A Switchfoot Concert – and a thank you to Switchfoot

As a family we went to a Switchfoot concert last night at The Ford Idaho Center Amphitheater. It was the girls first rock concert. I bought tickets for this show back in May as soon as we knew we were moving for sure and it was concert week with Live Nation and they had discounted tickets for this show.

I was quite excited to go. We had really good eats very close to the stage. I love seeing Switchfoot. They put on a great show. It was a different tour this time because they were performing with 2 other main acts and so the three acts rotate orders each new night. So, we didn’t know who was first, second or third for this concert. The other two groups were Matt Nathanson and Blue October. I have heard of neither of the other two. But the tickets were cheap enough that I figured it was worth it just for Switchfoot. The hope was that they weren’t the last band of the night.

We got there and wandered a little bit to scope out the food. We are going to concert there again on Thursday and will be needing food that night so we wanted to see what was available. We think we found some good options for Thursday (more on that concert Friday or Saturday).

The concert started and we were happy to find out that Switchfoot was the first band of the evening. Very early into the show Jon (the lead singer) headed into the crowd like he does at all shows. But he wandered a lot at this show. In fact he came right by us. Here is a picture of “A” and I right in front of him (I think he pointed at me, ok maybe not, but still):

The rest of the show was fun. They played for an hour and hit a lot of their big songs.

Here was the setlist:

• Stars
• Dark horses
• A Beastie Boys song I didn’t know
• This is your life
• I won’t let you go
• Mess of me
• Where the light shines through 
• Hello hurricane 
• Dare you to move – With Blue October
• Where I belong
• Meant to live

I was surprised they played nothing from their latest album, but I suppose if they only had an hour they wanted to get in the big hits and maybe attract some new listeners.

They did an acoustic version of hello hurricane:

My wife took a few videos with her phone:

After they finished we talked about staying a little longer to see the next act and possibly more. The next act was Matt Nathanson, and his second song was a bit lusty and then between the second and third song while he was talking to the crowd he used the “F” word about 5 times in a 90 seconds. While I was able to ignore it, it wasn’t right for my kids nor the other kids in the crowd (in my opinion). So, we decided to head out. I was hoping to see Blue October after one of them coming out during Switchfoot, but it was already after 8:00 and if Matt got another hour, then tear down and set up for Blue October it was going to be 9:30 before tBlue October was going to even start playing. With the girls fading and MAtt not impressing us we headed home. Which was fine with me since Switchfoot was the band we all wanted to see.

What a blessing that Switchfoot was first. I am VERY happy Matt wasn’t first. That may have killed the evening for us from the start. And if Switchfoot would have been last we would have been up VERY late as well.

Now to the highlight of the evening for me. The best part of the evening wasn’t seeing Switchfoot. I have seen them, I think, at least 6 or 7 other times. It wasn’t going with my family, exactly. It wasn’t someone looking at me and yelling, “Hey is that a Five Iron Frenzy T-Shirt?” and “I love that band!”. The best part was seeing “A” singing silently to most of the Switchfoot songs. She has been listening to them a lot and she really enjoys their music. With all the lows she as been feeling with the move this was a big UP for her, and she said she really enjoyed it. That made the evening 100000% more important to me than anything else about the evening. Seeing her smile and sing these wonderful words along with Jon made me so very happy.

So thank you Switchfoot for making my daughter day (and mine as well).