To Whom It May Concern

Going To A Concert!!!!

I recently celebrated a birthday, and belly decided to get me tickets to a concert. Creed with special guest Staind. Yes, I'm a closet Creed fan. I don't go around promoting it, but I do enjoy their music. Belly knows this, and so when Creed announced they were getting back together for a reunion tour and new album, I was pretty excited. She had to let me know before my birthday that she bought the tickets because I was going to get them myself, I felt kinda bad but that's better than having an extra set of tickets.

We drove into Counciltucky and headed over to the Mid America Center, I was hoping to find a fast food place, wasn't all that interested in Burger King but that was all they had to eat around there that was quick, and we only had about 45 minutes so we quickly ate a couple burgers/fries and headed on over to the auditorium. Our seats were 5 rows up from the front, on the side, and they were excellent.

The opening band was called "Like A Storm". They were decent, better than most opening bands. Sounded Australian, the best description is an emo breaking benjamin. Pretty good guitar, vocals are so so, lyrics are pretty sophomoric but they are young so they'll get better. After their set they came out and hung out in the crowd, I thought that was pretty cool, and a good way to develop a following. From watching a couple of their songs on YouTube this morning, the comments for the videos seem to show that their approach is working.

Then they cleared the front of the stage and set up for Staind. They kicked off with "Fade", which is my favorite Staind song. Vocalist Aaron Lewis sings like he's in pain, and I have no idea how the lead guitarist can continue playing the guitar the way he does (bent way over then coming back up) without having to see a chiropractor after every show. He was going up and down so fast that I thought he was going to smash his guitar a couple of times. It is interesting, I like Staind but I don't have any of their albums, so as I sat through their of like 8 or 10 songs I was thinking "Damn, these guys have more hits than I thought".

It was during the Staind set that an irritating group of young people sat down in front of us. I don't think they had tickets for the seats they sat in, but despite how stupid they were acting I just left that alone. There were about 4 or 5 fat emo looking girls, one skinny girl, and the most annoying of all was this 16 or 17 year old skinny douchebag. I don't know if he had mental problems, was on drugs, a flaming homo, or what, but he kept standing up and turning around, blocking the set, yelling, lifting his shirt in the air, general asshattery and such. He had a Hollister shirt on too, and for that reason alone I wanted to do a flying kick from my row and lay a boot on his skull. Thankfully they left after Staind, no surprise there, there were a lot of really emo looking kids up front for the Staind set. I hate emo morons.

Then they stripped down the stage once more and set everything up for Creed. That took about 10 minutes, then the lights went down, and this large black sheet fell from the ceiling and Creed opened up with "Bullets". That was kind of surprising, I figured they would pick one of their new songs or maybe "Are You Ready?", but being a big Weathered fan, I was glad they went with Bullets. They used a bunch of pyro, with massive flames firing off behind the band. This is the first concert I have ever gone to that had pyro, the big arena concerts I went to in the 80's all used the huge laser shows. Even though we were probably 40 meters or so from the actual pyro effects, each time they blasted off the heat wave was blistering, it must be insanely hot on the stage itself.

They followed up Bullets with the new song "Overcome", then "What If". Another new song after that, I think it may have been "To Whom It May Concern" but I'm not sure. Then "Say I", "Torn", "Are You Ready", and "Never Die". "My Own Prison" followed that, then "Faceless Man", and the final hit song from the My Own Prison album, an energentic performance of "One".

After that, "With Arms Wide Open", then Stapp talked about losing someone close and sang "What's This Life For?". Then they did bows and set the guitars down and walked off the stage. At this point I was like "WTF???" because I was fully expecting "One Last Breath", which is my favorite song. No concert would be complete from Creed without that song, in my opinion.

But they weren't done, they came back out and set up in a close group on stools and did their first concert performance of the new song "Rain", and then broke into "One Last Breath" much to my happiness and apparently the rest of the crowd. After that they finished up with "Higher", a song I had completely forgot about.

I think that basically covers everything. It was certainly weird seeing Stapp without his hair. They played with a 5 piece set, with a touring rhythm guitarist named Eric Friedman. The extra guitar gave a lot of the songs a bit more punch, and being a guitar rock fan I actually liked it. It was also good to see Brian Marshall back in the band again, and they did a lot more guitar solos than I ever saw in any previous live shows (never in person, watching on video). That was good, as I know in the past that Stapp had pissed off the other members by trying to force them NOT to do the guitar solos then arguing with them about it after shows.

All in all, awesome show!!! I don't know what to make of the new music yet, but I remember it took me a good year to get into Weathered after I bought it years ago, and therefore this may be the same thing. Even if the album is half as good as Weathered I will still probably be pretty happy with it.