Imogen!!

Tonight was the Imogen Heap concert, and it was AWESOME!!!!!!! (All exclamation marks very well-deserved)
I tend to forget how much I love going to concerts until I'm actually at one. I forget how much I love being in a group of people that's all crazy about the same thing, especially when a hit song is played and the crowd goes crazy. I forget how fun it is to watch an artist perform and really pour their heart and soul out for you up there on the stage. I forget how cathartic it is to be at a concert, how I always leave feeling simultaneously energetic and relaxed and absolutely in awe. I'm blown away by musicians. So impressed, and also so jealous because singing and performing like that seems like it would be such an incredible emotional release, and I don't think I can do anything in my own life that would even come close to that. Writing is as close as I can get I think, but it's not remotely close enough. So I live vicariously through musicians. I think maybe we all do, to a certain extent.
Anyway, what can I say about Imogen Heap? If you aren't familiar with her and her music, you are missing out. Katy first turned me on to Imogen Heap when we were living together, and I'm so glad she did. It's hard to explain her musical style. Well, hard for me to explain anyway since I'm not a huge music buff. Most people either know her song "Hide and Seek" (which I believe gained popularity after getting some play on The O.C.) or know the stuff she did with the band Frou Frou (their most popular song is probably "Let Go", which plays at the very end of Garden State). So there's a starting point. I highly, highly recommend you check her out if you haven't already. Maybe her music won't reach out and grab you like it did me, but I think she's freakin' awesome. Her set tonight was great. She played at Stubbs in Austin and it was an outdoor concert, which was cool. She did a very good mix of new stuff and older favorites, and she also took a few requests, which amazed me (I don't think I've ever been at a concert where the artist actually responded to requests). She has good stage presence and she was great to her fans. She hung around afterwards and signed autographs for everyone who stayed. I normally never, ever hang out after shows but I did it because Matthew wanted to. I'm so glad I did. She was super friendly and signed a picture for me AND took a picture with me!


All in all, it was a fantastic evening. Definitely in my Top Five Concert Experiences of All Time, and I've seen...well, not a ton of concerts, but quite a few. And some of them really big. In fact, tonight I got to thinking that maybe I should make a list of people/groups I've seen in concert. I'm afraid I've already forgotten quite a few off the top of my head. Thankfully I keep my obsessive journal, so I could always go back through it and figure out exactly who I've seen in concert, but here's the basic list:
Madonna (at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas!!)
Dave Matthews Band (three times)
Tool (twice...hopefully soon to be three times, since I'm sure they'll do a big tour this year)
A Perfect Circle
Audioslave
Jane's Addiction
Jurassic Five
Pearl Jam
Pat Benatar
Blue Oyster Cult
Tommy Lee (I did not pay money for this, he happened to perform at a barbecue where I was serving beer)
Willie Nelson
The Beach Boys (well, the surviving members...you know how that goes)
Chicago
Three Dog Night
Tone Loc
2 Live Crew (Tone Loc and 2 Live Crew performed together at a frat party I went to once)
Vanilla Ice (performed on my college campus)
M.C. Hammer (I was 8. My first concert ever)
Bob Schneider
Cowboy Mouth
Matchbox Twenty
Everclear
Lifehouse
Common
Simon and Garfunkel (Giving a free concert at the Coliseum in Rome! Definitely one of the cooler things I've ever lucked into experiencing)
and now Imogen Heap

I'm positive I'm missing some. If you've been to a concert with me and it's not on this list, remind me. And I think one of my goals in life should definitely be to see more concerts. It sure does make me happy.

In other news, Matthew and I were discussing tonight what a terrible hag I make. He was telling me that he'd been talking about me with his sister and she told him that she thinks I'm pretty (awww) and she wondered why I don't have a boyfriend and then told Matthew, "Is it because she spends too much time with you?" Haha. I appreciated that his sister attempted to blame my single-ness on Matthew, but it's definitely not his fault. We don't spend nearly enough time together for me to be his official fag hag. Plus I would just suck at that.
For one thing, I don't think I get nearly excited enough about all his boys as a good hag should. Take this recent example:
To make a long story short(ish), Matthew lost touch with his first important boyfriend seven years ago. As in he lost touch with him entirely and had had no contact with him since summer of 1999. Recently Matthew sent me a sad IM one night, telling me that he was looking for this long-lost boy but was thinking he could very well be dead since there was a rumor he'd been working the street, gotten AIDS, and died. So I helped him look for this guy online for a while that night and found nothing, but reassured him that the odds of the friend actually being dead were very, very slim. Sure enough, two days later Matthew finally located him online after years of searching for him on and off. Why did this guy suddenly show up in a search now? I don't remember all the details, but suffice it to say Matthew found him and contacted him and he's going to Houston tomorrow to see this long-lost friend for the first time in years. Kymberli got really excited with Matthew and pointed out that he and long-l0st guy have in some ways been living parallel lives and were right under each other's noses in Austin several times over the past seven years. People he works with got incredibly excited and insisted that he HAD to go to Houston to see him, that it could all be fate. His sister was thrilled. And my reaction? In a nutshell: "Oh, cool. See, I told you he probably wasn't dead."
And then there's the whole fashion thing. If you've met me, you know that fashion really isn't my thing. I care about what I look like, but only to a certain extent. So when Matthew began talking on Monday about coordinating outfits for Thursday, I kind of just ignored that part of the conversation. Then when he mentioned it again on Tuesday I realized he was serious and was like, "We're really coordinating outfits?" and he said, "Well, I don't want us to look like twins." Um, trust me on this: the odds of me ever being remotely fashionable enough to look like Matthew's twin? ZERO. So I just kind of laughed and then he added, "Plus I don't want to get all cute and then you be in like, jeans and a spaghetti strap shirt. I mean, not that you'd ever wear jeans and a spaghetti strap shirt as an outfit to a concert." Except that I totally would wear jeans and a spaghetti strap shirt to a concert! Jeans with a spaghetti strap shirt is like, my uniform! Especially for going out! Does that not work as a fashion concept anymore?! What's a girl to do?! Luckily I was already planning to wear a flowy skirt to the concert because I knew it would be outdoors and crowded and I wanted to be as cool as possible. Plus later on I realized that when I think "spaghetti strap shirt" I'm thinking of the sparkly, dressy spaghetti strap shirts I wear out and that when Matthew said "spaghetti strap shirt" he probably meant the very plain ones that I use as workout clothes and pajamas. The Spaghetti Strap Shirt Spectrum is pretty broad, actually. Still, I think I fail the fashion portion of the hag test, too.

So, in summary:
Imogen Heap: AMAZING.
Ashley: Worst hag ever.
And I adore Matthew.
Tomorrow: off to the beach for the weekend!!