Shearwater concert

Although I titled this blog entry “Shearwater concert,” perhaps I should have called it “Damien Jurado concert.”  The point is, this past Wednesday, we had another Subkirke concert and Damien Jurado and the band, Shearwater, were both there.  Although DJ opened, it seemed as though perhaps we had more people actually come out to see him instead of the so-called headliners since we had a bit of a “mass” exodus after he was done. That doesn’t mean it was a bad concert or we were disappointed; we had over 100 people turn out which is pretty amazing for a mid-week thing.  Both he and the band are very talented musicians so the quality of the performance was very good.

This was the first concert (except Great Lake Swimmers who I’ve known for years) where I’ve actually listened to the music before the concert.  My impression was that Jurado wasn’t so great; on the album I listened to he had/has a lot of musical motifs that repeat seemingly endlessly and drove me crazy.  In live concert he seemed concerned about offending the atmosphere (a church) so he edited himself a lot and didn’t even play some songs.  I thought he sounded fantastic.  I liked him much better than the album.

On the other hand, I had listened to the latest Shearwater album, Golden Archipelago, repeatedly and loved it.  It has heart-rendingly lovely melodies and harmonies and it’s nice and quiet and so forth.  Perhaps this is why my impression of the concert wasn’t so great. Some of our congregants are convinced they are too old for this “loud rock music,” so we had lured them by telling them how quiet it would be.  Yeah, not so much.  The band only played one or two of the quiet songs from the album.  The rest of the time (which was 75 minutes in total – LONG!!) they played all the loudest, rockin’-est songs on older albums.  They actually blew an amp on about the fourth song.  It was really loud.  We’ve only ever had one group this loud before, Nomo, and that’s primarily because they had so many musicians and instruments (and brass).  I can’t believe our so-called older congregants actually managed to stay as long as they did.  However, I’m sure they will never come again.  Darn it.  I mean, don’t get me wrong: Shearwater has hugely talented musicians and produced some amazing songs (and they gave us free t-shirts, which means I have to love them).  It was just loud and long.  And not what we expected exactly.  A lot of the “younger” people RAVED about the concert, so all-in-all, it went really really well.  I just want the actual congregation to show up and appreciate our efforts.

I want the congregation to appreciate because we want them to show up.  The stated point of this whole concert series is to reach out to the greater community to get people into the church so they can see that the church and church people are not scary or threatening, but are part of the community and a place where they can “hang out.”  Then maybe people wouldn’t be so averse to coming on a Sunday morning.  But in order for the greater community to experience hanging out with church people, there have to actually BE church people THERE.  This is our current difficulty.  On the other hand, David and I (if not anyone else) have really experienced the ministry this has been to the musicians themselves.  Every single band/performer has been amazed and effusive about how this venue is not at all what they expected.  We are not what they expected; we are normal and nice and hospitable.  I’m not sure what it is that they expect – perhaps a lot of preaching and/or censorship.  We don’t ask bands we think we will have to censor, which takes care of that problem and we feed them real food which seems to pretty much mean they think we are the greatest thing around.  But then that gets them thinking.  They have asked a lot of amazing questions about why we are doing this.  And when we tell them, they have the exact reaction we are hoping to get from the community who attends the concerts.  I think a lot of the bands have gone away from their experience with us thinking that maybe church and Christians are not so bad after all.  YAY!!  Score one for us!

I know I have spent a long time writing about this, but it’s something David in particular and I, by association, have spent an awful lot of time on lately.  Quite a few of David’s hours every week are virtually consumed with planning and phoning (his favourite thing, not) and cajoling booking agents into sending their talent our way.  So it’s a big deal to us.  Jan spent the first hours of the night at a friend’s who was gracious enough to have him last minute when another friend who had been planning to have him went into labour (the nerve, ha ha).

The first picture is Damien Jurado playing.  Second is Shearwater (notice David’s spiffy installation on the wall behind).  The third is a member from Shearwater playing our organ and the trumpet at the same time.  Our organist says she has a lot to live up to, ha ha.

So thanks for listening to all this.  Like I said, it’s kind of a big deal to us.