In 2022, I saw one concert.
In 2023, I more than doubled that number to six concerts.
In 2024, I doubled that number again all the way up to 13 concerts. That's still not a ton compared to my historical norms, but it still felt pretty darn good ( Read more... )

Thanks to the one-two combo of pandemic and kiddo, I had not been back to the Grog Shop since February 27, 2020 when I saw We Were Promised Jetpacks. I returned to see The Pietasters on Saturday, December 14 for a rare appearance in Cleveland ( Read more... )

On Saturday, December 14, my family went to Severance Hall to see the Orchestra. Or more precisely, to see a very small subset of the orchestra - a brass quintet along with a guest vocalist. The occasion was another "Music Explorers" session similar to the one Birdie & I went to in April. This time it was subtitled "Holiday Brass ( Read more... )

So far this year I've seen Mavis Staples as well as Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan. Mavis and Bob are both in their eighties. Willie is 91. Back when I bought the Willie Nelson tickets there was a brief discussion on Facebook about how old various musicians were when I saw them. After poking through my lists, I'm reasonably confident that Willie ( Read more... )

My friend Judie had purchased a pair of tickets to see Neko Case in Columbus on Saturday, October 19, but then she had a chance to take photos at the Rock Hall inductions the same night. I was happy to snag her tickets. We dropped Birdie off at M's sister's house, then had a nice sushi dinner out by ourselves at Akai Hana, which is typically (and ( Read more... )

As previously noted, I was in San Francisco in September with my colleagues Steve and Vivek to attend Dreamforce, the annual conference for Salesforce. As with many such corporate conferences, there was a concert / party night scheduled as part of the conference. So it was that on Wednesday, September 18, I found myself in Oracle Park for the third ( Read more... )

On Thursday, September 12, gieves, John and I went to see Willie Nelson's Outlaw Music Festival Blossom. Well, that was what was supposed to happen. Instead, John totally botched his calendar and was out of town that day, so Brandt claimed his ticket in the center section of the pavilion 2 or 3 rows from the back. jumpinfool was very close to us one row back and a ( Read more... )

WRUW, aka my old radio station, hosted Studio-A-Rama for the first time since 2019. I didn't feel the need to spend all day at a concert, but the headliner was Cheekface and multiple people from WRUW have been geeking about them for the last year. In particular, my friend Brandt has been raving about them a ridiculous amount. Since Brandt got me to ( Read more... )

The last time I bothered to make a music bucket list, one of the artists featured was Mavis Staples. Since then, she's come to Cleveland once, but we were on Prince Edward Island. When it was announced that Mavis would open for Norah Jones at Blossom this summer, M and I bought tickets immediately. Sure, it was only an opening act, but given that ( Read more... )

The Cleveland Museum of Art has been doing the City Stages for at least a decade now. This series has usually involved free world music on Wednesdays in July outdoors at Transformer Station. My radio station has livestreamed most of them. I've gone sporadically over the years, but this year I figured that at Birdie's age, a free outdoor concert ( Read more... )