July 7

The Decemberists and Andrew Bird at the Hollywood Bowl!


I noticed for the first time (maybe I wasn't looking before) that you can see part of the Hollywood sign from the seating area. I wasn't even as high up as you could get; I'm sure that from the last row, you could see the whole thing. Pretty cool.


Band of Horses played first. They're okay, if not a bit whiny and... nondescript.


THIS GUY. And his stupid friends. They were really rude and unpleasant. If you ever see him anywhere, give him a dirty look. He said lascivious and inappropriate things to us. Booooo.


And then he took his nasty shoes off and aired out his nasty feet. Give him a REALLY dirty look if ever you should see him.


Then Andrew Bird came on. Seriously, this is the best photo I could take given the distance and the natural semi-unsteadiness of my hands. I only just realized that I didn't have the image stabilizing function on my new camera turned on, so this would have probably been a million times clearer had I known this. Oh well.


Luckily, there are the giant screens, so I could pretend that I was close enough to get a decent shot. You can see blurries where he's playing his violin like a guitar.


The Decemberists! Different angle. We moved seats to the employee section. You can see that from the first two shots of the stage to this one, that paneled wall is gone to make way for the LA Philharmonic, who played with said band. It was really good. Also, apparently, the lead singer's sister was married recently, and the concert was her celebration party thing. Why can't I remember what that word is. Ah, RECEPTION.


At one point, the lead singer asked the audience to humor him one thing and open and hold up all of our cell phones. So even though this photo is a bit of the suck, it was really cool seeing a field of blue screens waving around. Most of the people (including me) closed their phones when they started playing songs again, but a lot actually kept them open for a while longer. This was not quite the peak of it, but almost. It was a fun show.