I Just Want To Go To A Concert

I am sorry, I am not willing to pay $97.58 for general admission at History, a Toronto club co-owned by Drake. Nor will I pay $446.25 for a seated ticket. The only time I would pay $446.25 is if I were taking a plane across the fucking ocean back to Sweden. 

Three thoughts:

1) I think I wanna take a trip to Sweden and see where both First Aid Kit and Jens Lekman grew up.

2) My wife and I have spent way too much money this year on concerts and shows. Here’s a list of performances I went to in the last three months of 2023 alone:

• When We Were Young festival in Las Vegas
• Audra McDonald
• Tool
• Frozen with the MN Orchestra
• The Grinch at Children’s Theatre
• Aladdin at the Orpheum
• Andrew McMahon
• The Nutcracker (okay, this was my neighbor’s daughter’s rendition of it, but still)
• Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme’s Holiday Show
• OnStage 2023 at Rosemount High
• Peter Pan at the Ordway

I’m looking at my feed reader this evening and browsing through everybody’s year-end posts. If I’m honest, while it’s amazing to see how much hard work people have done this past year, they mostly make me feel like I’ve wasted my year.

But then I look at that list of shows I’ve seen in the past three months and feel a little bit better.

Most of those shows were seen with my kids.

The other ones were all seen with my wife (except the Tool show, which I got to see with my best buddy).

Even as I struggle personally right now with finding purpose in life, at least I can admit that I’m out there experiencing life and sharing it with those I love.

2024 is already shaping up to be a big year of experiences as well. There’s really no better time to appreciate life than the present, no?

3) Seriously, shame on Ticketmaster, Live Nation, and all the market forces that conspire to make shows unnecessarily expensive for the vast majority of people to attend. I’m insanely fortunate that I’m able to afford all that, but it still stings every time I fork over gobs of money just to feel the joy I get from seeing artists do what they do best.