Okay Owen Pallett stuff! I'm just gonna dump everything I can think of here.
Jennifer Castle opening was very good -- really impressive voice... I think I would have maybe preferred a bit more instrumentation than just the guitar but it was still really good. Also apparently she'd just gotten back from a week in Mexico the previous day and was thus kind of sleepy... all the more impressive!
Showed up fairly early and planted myself in the front row so I had lots of time for people-watching... at one point Robbie Gordon the drummer showed up on crutches (he didn't have those in Toronto last week!), which was later revealed to be because he'd fallen off a bunk bed (Owen: "He was so excited at the novelty of living this childhood dream that he leapt out of bed and sprained his ankle")
Owen's plan for the concert: "I'm going to play some loopy doopy solo stuff, then some band stuff, then there'll be a Q&A, then... well we'll see how it goes from there"
the Q&A: initially there was silence and Owen said "I don't know whether to be disappointed or relieved" then eventually someone asked when he started playing violin and he kind of acted disappointed (he asked "do you have a smartphone?" cause I'm pretty sure he's been asked that quite a lot) but did go on to say he'd played since he was 3 and recounted the tale of how he stopped during teenage because growing facial hair caused him to develop a violin hickey which his high school "friends" made fun of (at a time when he "wasn't getting any other kind of hickeys")
after that he asked if anyone had a "more interesting question" to which someone else asked what kind of looping software he used... once again he kind of sighed disappointedly and said something along the lines of "... yeah I read a lot and I like to cook... okay fine I use ____ looping software" (I forget what it was, I don't know much about looping)
"i'm going to do something a little different now, I haven't done this since the last time I was in a church .... I'll leave that up to your imaginations" (it was actually playing the Great Elsewhere solo instead of with the band, which sounded amazing and asdgkohaasdlk god I love that song)
also church related, at the end when Owen was naming all the people he wanted to thank, he asked if he was missing anyone, to which Matt Smith raised his arms in the air with an awe-filled expression. "oh yes, right, the... architecture! Thanks to the architecture..."
and one more church related thing, after Tryst With Mephistopheles he said "okay now I'm going to play some more church-appropriate songs... in mood if not in lyrics" (and then went on to play The Passions)
before I Am Not Afraid: he commented that he wasn't going to have any children, saying that he recently did a buzzfeed quiz about it. The first question was "Do you like sleep?" so already he wasn't doing well, and then the second one was "Do you like fecal matter?" to which he was like "I haven't really had enough exposure to fecal matter to know for sure, but I already failed the first question so..."
Anyway, concert was gorgeous as always. He closed with CN Tower which was pretty awesome as I haven't heard that one live before (took me a while to realise what he was playing)
Also bought myself one of the new In Conflict songbooks which I'm pretty excited to play (even though I'm extremely out of practice and don't have access to a piano anymore most of the time... whatever, I'll make it work)
Also disclaimer: any things that I quoted Owen as saying are not word-for-word, my memory is not that good! So if you think there's something that I totally misinterpreted do let me know.
