Rockin Weekend

This year, Nate and I have started listening to the local station, 89.3 The Current, just because it's a bit different from mainstream radio and we like alot of indie music which they happen to play. The Current puts on an outdoor concert at the Walker Art Center each year called Rock the Garden (since it's sort of near the Sculpture Gardens). When I heard the headliner was the group The Decemberists, I knew it would be the perfect anniversary present for Nate. He loves the Decemberists. I remember him saying he would like to see them live sometime, so I jumped at the opportunity to do this for him.

The concert was this past Saturday and while we were a little nervous going in because we had never really been to something like this before and didn't know what to expect, we ended up having a blast. The gates opened around 3:00 pm, we headed in and found ourselves a lovely patch of grass at the base of the hill facing the stage, spread a blanket and chilled out. Well, more like fried out, it was a bright sunny day. Thank goodness for sunscreen! After a little while Ali came with a few of her friends and they camped out on some grass not far from us.

The first band was the local group Solid Gold and I loved them! We ended up buying their CD. I really hope these guys go places, they are super good. They played for about 45 minutes. We decided to grab a little snack to munch on. It was here we discovered the one downside to the event - all of the food was super expensive. But we managed to share a few things throughout the evening. The next group to take the stage was Yeasayer - I thought they were ok, not my favorite. After that was the group Calexico, who I enjoyed a bit more.

Finally it was 8:30 and the highlight of the evening - the Decemberists took the stage and they were SO unbelievably awesome!!! They performed their entire album "Hazards of Love" which is kind of a rock opera and it was amazing to hear it live. The female singers they have for this special album are just incredible. The entire energy of the performance just blew me away. After they finished that set they played a few more of their other songs which were also fun to rock out to. They closed the show by bringing the girls back out to sing Heart's "Crazy for You" which again, just blew me away! Because of noise ordanance and such there was a strict 10:00 end time on the music, which was a bummer because I could've watched these guys all night!

No pictures from the event sadly. I didn't drag a camera along. The good news though is, I will soon be adding pictures on a regular basis hopefully as my replacement anniversary gift from Nate will be a new small sized digital camera. I'll tell that story in another post though as I'm sure you're all scratching your heads saying "replacement gift?"

The rest of the weekend was full of singing for two masses at St. William's church with the Praise Project and Father's Day. It went well at the church, it sounds like we might be asked back so that would be pretty awesome. Then we had both of our families over to our house for a barbeque. We ended up mostly hanging out inside though since the weather really did not cooperate. Still, it was nice to enjoy the company of both of our immediate families. Then Nate and I more or less crashed since we were going, going, going all weekend. Things are calming down considerably now, nothing major scheduled for the next couple of weeks, so we're going to enjoy a nice breather!