#ronboy

The first year since 2022 that I haven't seen The National live (tbf they also didn't tour this year, so would have been hard), but Matt solo is close enough to tide me over lol. Athougment of sorts:

Utrecht again! Technically would've had the option to see Matt in Germany, but only Berlin and Hamburg which are way further for me, so I'm not complaining. Same venue as EE last year, but in one of the bigger concert halls. This time they even let us wait in front of the actual hall instead of downstairs in the foyer, where the EE queue got very bewildered looks from many old people lol.

Ronboy was a very good opener – won't lie, most of her music isn't really my thing, but she's undeniably a great performer, very good stage presence. She brought Matt out for Our Disaster, which is the first time I've seen the main act support the support (begin the begin again) at a show. And she was great as backup for Matt as well! Shame we never got to hear the carrot soup story...

I feel like most of Matt's solo stuff is more low-key than The National, but they made it work well live. The band was great, special shout-out to the drummer (Sterling Laws I think?), absolute machine, was hoping during Ronboy that they were also playing with Matt because of him mainly.

Matt threw his cup of vodka (really hope there was a mixer in there somewhere) from the back of the stage and hit his own lyric monitor, which, to his credit, he also cleaned up, but it also... shorted the guitar or something? So it stopped working during the intro to Terrible Love and we got a very extended intro as the crew fixed it. Matt did not help. He tried to get a harmonica from backstage to replace the guitar <3

Speaking of the lyric monitor, could've just been because I was so close to center stage, but it was very noticeable when he was looking at it lol. Mostly during the new songs, but also Nowhere Special, which... fair.

We got two new songs, Why Don't Nobody Love Me (which has been played a few times), which was fun, and Black Letter Font, which was completely new and a bit confused. Though they did write it that day apparently, at least the version they played?

The two National "covers" (feels weird calling them that) were pretty obvious crowd-pleasers, but the band did great with both and Matt got to run around the balconies during Terrible Love, so who am I to complain. Made the mistake of looking at setlists from the last couple of shows before so I had a tiny bit of hope we would get Gospel (which I've never seen live), but alas :(

Encore was very good in theory, but Times of Difficulty and Inland Ocean fell a bit flat, felt like they needed more energy to be effective closers. Bangin Blue Monday cover though, even if I don't really know the original that well lol.