I asked Coop to write up his thoughts about the two concerts he went to this year. He did!
This year, I decided to step a little bit out of my comfort-zone and try to get out of the house a bit more. It was a lot of baby steps with things like getting gas on my own, a grocery trip on my own, and going out to eat. But by far the biggest and funnest thing I did this year that I doubt I would have done in years past were the concerts I went to. While I definitely wouldn’t have gone if Landon hadn’t chauffeured me both times, I still think it was a reasonably big step for me, and it has me thinking of potential concerts to go in the future.
The first concert was for Two Door Cinema Club in May. I had first started listening to them in November 2023 when I first heard “I Can Talk,” on a random NBA2K soundtrack, and not long after I heard their most popular song “What You Know” and I started listening to them a lot, and a few months later I bought concert tickets for them.
They were performing at The Union downtown, and Landon and I got there pretty early since it was general admission so we could get closer to the stage. Then Landon made a bet with me that he said he does at any concert he goes to with friends, where you try to guess 3 songs that the band are going to play, and whoever's list of songs get performed first wins, and we decided that the loser pays for the merch. Clearly I didn’t totally understand the bet, and I just chose their 3 most popular songs: “What You Know,” “Undercover Martyn,” and “Sun.” Those were the final three songs they ended the concert with, so needless to say I lost. But the merch was pretty cool, with my shirt having a colorful silhouette of a cat and a palm tree on the back, and I also got a free TDCC themed foam finger.
After buying the merch, we got a really good spot that was really close to the stage, and we stood around for about an hour before the opener Day Wave came out. I listened to a little bit of their stuff before the concert, because I wanted to maximize my enjoyment for the concert, but I didn’t feel it that much and I left it at that. But I’m really glad to say that they were really good, and they impressed both Landon and me, with Landon even trying to Shazam a song, but he couldn’t because it was too loud. So my first impression of the concert experience was really good, and it was with a band that I didn’t listen to that much! I liked them so much that in the days after the concert I re-listened to them, and I ended up saving a few of their songs that I still listen to today (Promises, Where Do You Go, Nothing At All).
After Day Wave finished performing, it was about another 30 minutes of standing around waiting for TDCC. We had been standing for a few hours already, and that wouldn’t end anytime soon. Another thing I remember from this night was that there was a big NBA Western Conference Finals game happening at the same time that we had to miss, and the service was so bad in the building that we didn’t find out what happened until the concert was over and we left the building a few hours later (Luka Doncic hit a game-winning three-pointer over Rudy Gobert to give the Mavs a 2-0 lead).
Then TDCC came out, and it was awesome from beginning to end. The songs they performed in order seemed to scale with the songs popularity, so the atmosphere just got more hype as the night went on, and this is definitely not a complaint by any means, but it felt like it was never gonna end. I didn’t really know what to expect in terms of the length of the concert and how many songs they would perform, because I’ve heard about bad concerts where the headliner only performs for a few songs, but everybody definitely got their money's worth.
It’s been 7 months since the concert, so I might forget a few songs, but all in all they performed 9/10 songs from Tourist History (Cigarettes In The Theatre, Come Back Home, Undercover Martyn, Do You Want It All?, This Is The Life, Something Good Can Work, I Can Talk, What You Know, Eat That Up It’s Good For You), 5/11 songs from Beacon (Next Year, Handshake, Sun, Sleep Alone, The World Is Watching) just one from Gameshow (Are We Ready?), 2 from False Alarm (Talk, Satellite), a few from Keep On Smiling (Everybody’s Cool, Lucky, High, Wonderful Life), as well as their most recent single Happy Customers, Changing Of The Seasons, and an unreleased song called Costume Party. So if my memory is correct, they performed 24 songs. I think my favorite moment of the concert was when they played Costume Party. I hadn’t listened to it before that night, but it was catchy and simple enough that I was still able to sing along, and the song seemed to mean a lot to the band members, because I believe it was their first song they made together. I also ended up listening to Come Back Home a lot more after the concert when I didn’t listen to it much before.
They ended the concert with their most popular songs “Undercover Martyn” and “What You Know,” and it was the perfect way to end the night. Landon seemed to be disappointed that they didn’t do an encore, because that seemed to be the expectation from concerts that he had been to, but alas it was officially over. He parked a little ways away from the venue and we were pretty quick on our way out and on the road, and I spent the ride home playing some of my favorite songs that they didn’t perform: “Satisfaction Guaranteed,” “So Many People,” “Not in this Town,” “Impatience is a Virtue,” “You’re Not Stubborn,” “Fever,” “Ordinary.”
Then in September came the Glass Animals concert. I had known of a few of their songs in the past few years, like “Heat Waves,” but that’s because basically everybody knows that song, and “Tokyo Drifting,” because it featured one of my favorite rappers, Denzel Curry. But it was in January where one of my Spotify Mixes played a song from them called “Life Itself,” and that really sparked my Glass Animals fandom. I listened to them a lot more in the coming months and started listening to their albums when they dropped their first single in four years “Creatures in Heaven,” and subsequently announced their next album and upcoming tour, and I got tickets quickly after that.
Much like the TDCC concert, this one was happening during a major sports event that I would have to miss, this time being the NFL season opener between the Chiefs and Ravens, and this one was also a thriller that came down to the final play.
This concert was at Utah First Credit Union Amphitheatre (formerly USANA). This was a different atmosphere than The Union because it was much bigger, and it was also outdoors. I could have gotten cheaper tickets if I chose to get lawn seats, but that required getting there earlier and we wouldn’t know how good our view of the show would be until we got there, so I was fine spending more for the assigned seats.
We made the three-song bet for this concert too, this time with no stakes because only I got a t-shirt this time, and he wanted to make it a bit more extreme this time with the loser getting a Glass-Animals themed tattoo, which I wasn’t willing to do. My three songs were: “Life Itself,” “Creatures in Heaven,” and “Tokyo Drifting.” While his songs were: “Youth,” “Wonderful Nothing,” and “I Don’t Wanna Talk.”
We got seated a little bit before the opener Eyedress started performing. I was surprised by how big they appeared to be on Spotify, with 18 million monthly listeners, just a few million short of Glass Animals, and their top 4 songs exceeded 100 million streams. But it didn’t really feel like they were that big because most of the seats were still empty while they were performing. And I tried listening to some of their stuff before the concert, but it wasn’t really for me, so I was hoping it would be similar to Day Wave where seeing them live would change my opinion about them, but I was thoroughly unimpressed. There was one song from them I liked more than the rest, and I found it on their Spotify, but it sounded nothing like how it sounded live, so I didn’t save anything from them.
After Eyedress concluded, it was more waiting around as staff members made preparations, and one of them placed a pineapple on stage, which has basically become a symbol for Glass Animals because of a lyric from my favorite song from them “Pork Soda” (Pineapples are in my head). They kept a spotlight on the pineapple until they came onto stage and it would come into play later.
The first song they performed was “Life Itself,” which was a great way to start the concert since that song is a big reason why I became fans of them in the first place, and it put me up 1-0 in the bet. But they followed that right up with “Wonderful Nothing,” which evened it up at 1-1. Then they played “Space Ghost Coast to Coast,” and a really cool part from this concert that stood out from the TDCC one were the special effects and special screens for every song, and for this song, the screen transitioned between retro polygons, with the main one I noticed being Squirtle from Pokemon. The next one was “A Tear in Space (Airlock),” which was their second single leading to the album, and that’s when I think Landon started to like them a lot more too. They played “Youth,” which put him up 1-2, but it was evened out when they played “Creatures in Heaven not too long after. When they played “Gooey,” the lead singer walked around the venue and made his way to the lawn seats and performed in front of them, which was a cool way of getting them a closer, more personal moment of the concert. The other songs that they played that I don’t have much to add for were “Lost in the Ocean,” “Show Pony,” “How I Learned to Love the Bomb,” and “Take a Slice.”
After they performed “Take a Slice,” there was a short pause, and since our bet was at 2-2 it created a moment of tension wondering if our song would be the next one. The audio started to build up, and it was the beginning of “Tokyo Drifting,” so I won the bet and won my grand prize of nothing at all. This song featured Denzel Curry, so I wondered how they would handle that with the feature not being there, but it was pretty cool because a holographic face of him singing the verse showed up on the side screens during it. And after that, the lead singer picked up the pineapple and placed it on top of his head, and I knew they were going to perform “Pork Soda” after that, and I was pretty hyped up. That was my favorite song from them leading up to the concert, and I had no idea if they were going to play it, and the performance of it was really awesome, and it felt like it was going to be the last song of the concert. The lead singer Dave Bayley shouted out everybody from the band during the outro of the song, and they went backstage.
But then I realized that this was the encore Landon was talking about, because even after they were done, everybody stayed and applauded and chanted. But I feel like I should have expected that because there was no way they weren’t going to perform “Heat Waves.” And after a few minutes, they came back out and concluded with their two biggest songs “The Other Side of Paradise,” and obviously “Heat Waves.”
These were both really awesome concerts, and I’m super glad I finally took the chance to do something like this. I think I probably preferred the TDCC concert a bit more, because it felt so much louder and the crowd seemed to be much more into it, but that could probably be attributed to being so close to the stage and being in an enclosed space. But both these concerts had their moments, and my experience with them definitely opens doors to going to more in the future.
