Full disclosure, I don’t listen to the radio. I used to, when I didn’t really have a choice (I mean, the first ipod shuffle didn’t come out until 2005 – and even then, it was a few years and iterations before I owned one; I had a Walkman and then a portable CD player while growing up, but batteries didn’t grow on trees, y’know?). But now that I do have a choice, I just prefer not to. (In my car, it’s podcast time. At home, crank the showtunes or put on a record. And yes, that often means an actual record. On vinyl.)
I also don’t love the radio because they seem to play the same ten songs over and over and over. While I can listen to my fav song on repeat like the best of ’em, I want that choice/control.
Because of this, it can sometimes be tricky finding new artists to listen to. So I love when my bestie will say – I heard this new song, and I think you’d like it. She’s usually right.
One time, this occurred almost a decade ago. She was editing a video and looking for a song to play with it, and she had stumbled across “Honey I’m Good” by Andy Grammer while diving down the music rabbit hole. She sent me a link, and I did enjoy it. We’ve since seem him a handful of times whenever he tours nearby, and I have to say – this is where he shines. (The first time we saw him was at Waterfest in Oshkosh, WI – it might have been his first tour? He was just starting out, and he had a VIP meet and greet where he sang a few acoustic songs and then said hello and signed things.)
I’m sure I’ve said on this blog a few times now that I have a dad who was a musician in the ’60s and who raised my sister and me to appreciate live music. I think Grammer is a great example of why. Watching artists create is my favorite thing because of the joy – and the thing about an Andy Grammer show is that every single person on that stage is BURSTING with joy, clearly loving what they are doing. Even if you’re not a fan of his music, you would be hard pressed not to be moved by the performance.
As he’s become more successful, his shows have grown over the years, and after a recent one, my bestie and I noted how much more produced it had become (more lights and tricks and whatnot). The joy was still there, but as folks who like laid back shows in preferably small venues, we have a harder time engaging when things get large/overly produced. We still had a great time, but we missed the feel of those earlier shows.
So when Grammer announced his latest tour would be a one-man show, yes please.
This was not a traditional show where Grammer played song after song for a scheduled amount of time. This was…different. There were songs, of course (he played acoustic guitar, and he had a gentleman playing electric that sat in the background), but there was also spoken-word poetry and stories. Oh, there were stories. Which is my favorite part of a live show – sometimes even more than them playing the songs they are telling the stories about.
The through line here was grief and service. Near the start of the show, he quoted someone (whose name I didn’t catch and who I can’t find online) who said (and I’m summarizing here because I didn’t write it down) how deeds done in the names of those we’ve lost become presents to them in the afterlife. This started off the show with a series of examples where after losing his mother, he opened himself to deeds of service by way of writing songs for people who needed them (not in a money sense, but in an emotional/soul sense). He sang a few of them after he told the stories, imagining that these deeds were arriving at his mother’s door through Amazon’s Heaven division (note: you don’t need to religious to get something out of his shows or music; his faith is a large part of who he is, but he doesn’t make others feel excluded because of it).
The show continued on, and there was even some audience participation. Before the show, he had everyone in the audience fill out these cards that had three prompts on them – someone you lost who you miss, an act of service you had recently done, and the name of someone who saved your life. The ushers collected these right before the show, and when Grammer came onto the stage, he was holding a large box of them. At three times during the show, he grabbed a handful of cards from the box. He started with the third prompt – he’d call out the name and invited the audience member to tell the story of how this person saved their life (it was optional, but everyone took him up on it). The second time, he merely read a number of acts of service to help inspire people to act. The last time he did this, he read off the person they missed. He called them up and offered four prompts – they had to finish the sentence. “I feel you would be most proud of me for…” “I feel your presence most when…” (and two more that I can’t remember off the top of my head).
Here’s the trick to it. Not everyone was called up, of course. but when he was listing off those prompts, you know everyone in the audience was answering them silently to themselves. At the end, he answered his own prompts about his mother, who he lost in 2009.
Ami Maxine 