Chris Carrabba Tonight, Awesome!

It was a packed Esplanade Concert Hall for Chris Carrabba's solo acoustic gig. Although I frowned at our ticket price of S$98 when the same gig in KL tomorrow costs RM$121, and between US$26 - US$29 in US.  We were surprised to see Cyril Niccolai stroll onto stage as a 30-minute opening act. Okaaay. He's Disney-nice and competent. But so so boring. (Which was why I didn't bother to check him out a couple of years back when he performed here) I couldn't help chuckling as I noticed his tendency for four-chord progressions. It brought to mind The Axis of Awesome's 'Four Chords'. Anyway, I took a much-needed pee break halfway through this tepid set.

Chris Carrabba finally came on slightly before 10pm. He started with 'Dusk and Summer' 'The Good Fight' (The friend swore I had gotten my head stuck in the toilet bowl). It was like a huge sing-along session. Everybody seemed to know the lyrics to every song he sang! Well, we're of the same generation, and we love him as the pulsating force behind The Dashboard Confessional. He's a brilliant songwriter of our times. He said he had no setlist, but what we heard was similar to the gigs in Boston and San Francisco. He only covered one song- Corey Branan's 'Tall Green Grass'. He stuck to the predictable all-time favorites and hits, left out a number, but did plenty of good ones. 75 minutes could only squeeze in that many songs, and still managed to have 'The Best Deceptions' as an encore.

All I wanted to hear was 'As Lovers Go'. That was done very early into the show. It was soooooo awesome. It sounded better tonight than it ever did in the records. It's a song that the man wrote out the lyrics within a letter (not printed from a computer screen) which he passed to me before I fled town on a month-long work trip to Bali. That was when we first started seeing each other, and I was going to bail on him because I didn't think we were on the same direction with regard to the definition of being in the relationship. :)  I guess that kinda stuck and became 'our song' for a while.

It was an amazing night. Chris Carrabba's powerful and emotive vocals strung together a tight solo. He's a brilliant guitarist too. New song 'Cold Comfort' thrilled me. We grew up (what I term as the formative years of teenagers) with the sounds of Dashboard Confessional. Young, a little childish and frank, but so so emo. Years on, we've all grown older. Today, I appreciate the maturity of 'Cold Comfort' in terms of songwriting- lyrics and music. Tonight, this is the one song that Singapore didn't sing along to. Heh.