Aimee Mann At The Bijou

I saw Aimee Mann at the Bijou Wednesday night, as the non-clever title above suggests. The concert was excellent. Aimee's Knoxville performance was the very last performance of her acoustic tour, which was kind of cool. As an end-of-the-tour bonus she handed out gift bags to some lucky audience members. She did a few requests during the show, and whoever's requests were picked got a gift basket. And several of them also got to play bongos during the song they requested. The gift baskets consisted mostly of items from the tour bus that she didn't have room to pack and take home, such as some books she had read and various food items. It was pretty funny overall. Aimee has a really laid-back attitude on stage, which was probably elevated by the fact that this was the last stop.
And of course, the music was fantastic.

But the part of the concert that really excited me was the guy who opened for her. I'd never heard of him before and he ended up blowing me away. His name's David Ford and he falls under the category of musicians that loop all the instrument tracks by themselves on stage so it sounds like a whole band is playing. I don't know what you call it but it seems to be a pretty popular thing to do these days. Anyway, this guy does it better than anyone I've seen yet. Unlike some of the artists that I've seen do this, this guy's music holds up when you strip the novelty away. I've been listening to his album quite a bit since I saw the show and I'm absolutely hooked on some of the songs.

Here's one of his videos. Hopefully your speakers are better than mine because the sound quality ain't too great. It's supposed to be quiet at the beginning, so don't turn your speakers up too loud.

He plays a lot more instruments in this video than he did during the concert, but the thing I liked about his live show was that he did a lot more vocal looping. He had about five or six harmonizing background vocals going in this song when I saw him do it.
If you get a chance to see him live don't hesitate!