First, was the Bright Eyes concert on Friday night, at the Chicago theater. This was a highly anticipated show for me, because I just love Bright Eyes. The frontman, Conor Oberst, is one of the best lyricists around these days, and I was excited to see if he put on a good show, too. The theater was beautiful, an old baroque movie palace. Our seats were awesome, we paid just a little extra and got box seats rather than balcony and it was so worth it. Soloist Andrew Bird opened the show, and reminded us a lot of Final Fantasy, who opened for Bloc Party when we saw them last year. His stuff was very inventive - any given song included several layers of looping, whistling, singing, guitar, glockenspeil, and two very interesting looking, er... instruments:
He had a nice voice and obviously was multi-talented, but after about 3 songs it got a little repetitive.
Bright Eyes on the other hand was really good, though Conor seemed sick, drinking lots of water and telling us about how he was cold all day. Listening to a BE album, you might think it's just him, but there were two other guitars, a drummer and a keyboardist. It was good fun, they sounded good and played no less than 3 of their war-protest songs. It struck me during the concert, as it has a couple of times before while listening to one of their albums, that they sometimes have more of a folky/country sound than I would ever usually go for. But that's only on a few songs, and regardless, the lyrics are too good to pass up. They didn't play my favorite song, unfortunately, but Brian sweetly put it on our mm50 iPod player when we got home.
The second OFT of the weekend was Donald's first orchestra concert at Northwestern on Saturday night. They played 3 pieces - a Brahms overture, a Brahms concerto for violin and cello and a Dvorák symphony. It was a good, free evening of culture (thanks Donald!)
Finally, the third OFT was going out for dinner with Brian's lab (including his boss) to celebrate some good news about a grant application. We went to Opera, a restaurant housed in an old film storage warehouse in the south loop. On Sundays and Tuesdays they have a prix fixe, which is a pretty great deal relative to the prices of each of their dishes. We had a fun night chatting with Weiss labbers and stuffing ourselves silly!
A pretty busy weekend, as you can see. Not sure what's up for next week, but my Chicago Architecture Foundation membership finally showed up, so perhaps we'll try to go on the architecture river cruise...
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