Death Cab for Cutie

As promised, here is my follow-up blog concerning the Death Cab for Cutie concert tonight at the Taste of Chicago. First of all, I was very excited to be there, seeing one of my favorite bands with some great friends for absolutely no charge. What is better than that? We arrived to the venue, Chicago's Petrillo Music Shell inside of Grant Park (where the Taste of Chicago is being held), about an hour before the concert was set to start. We noticed that the free seats were first come first served, spread across a large lawn. However, there were seats very close to the stage guarded off. We approached the event staff and asked how we could get to sit near the stage in the fenced off seats. They said we could purchase tickets for twenty dollars, or answer some trivia about the band and try our luck at winning the tickets. One of my friends got the trivia question correct and we got even better free seats than we had planned on.

Since we were early, we got pretty close to the stage. We were seated in the fourth row in the direct middle, perfect seats! In fact, these were possibly the best tickets for a show I had ever received. I have only been in the front row to a show once, and that was last year at Lollapalooza for the Foo Fighters and I camped out at the stage all day until their performance at night. Aside from that concert, I had never been so close to the stage and my friends and I were thrilled!

The band started off the night with an accoustic performance from Ben Gibbard, the lead singer of Death Cab for Cutie, of the song ''I will follow you into the dark''. I thought it was quite a bold move to perform the first song accoustically, as most bands wait until the middle of the concert to do so, if they perform acoustically at all. It was amazing and his voice was crystal clear, the crowd ate it up. The rest of the concert exceeded my expectations and will go down as one of my favorite concerts I have ever witnessed. The list is pretty long, so that is high praise.