Courtenay Brown

On Saturday I went to see The Gaslight Anthem play in Denver. I’d bought two tickets a month or so ago, in hopes that my little sister would fly out to see our favorite band and, oh, side bonus, her favorite bigger sister named me, but she couldn’t make it. I halfheartedly searched for a replacement, but how can I replace my sister? Plus I don’t know anyone else who loves Gaslight as much as we do, or who claims to know all the words to all the songs and sings as badly as we do. So I went by myself and gave the other ticket away to a stranger.

Anyway the show was amazing, I liked it even better than when I saw them in Seattle last year. It is my new best-show-ever. The band released a new studio album in June, American Slang, which I have struggled to like because I found it to be overproduced and less energetic than The ’59 Sound, Sink or Swim, and the Senor and the Queen EP. Live, however, the American Slang songs were all awesome (and they thankfully spared us the bad-rap-type intro to Boxer), and Sink or Swim songs that sound rough on that album were also better live.

I got a T-Shirt, actually I bought two so I could send one to my sister, but the one I kept for myself has a picture of a cougar on it and the phrase “Older but Bolder!”. It’s a reference to one of my Gaslight favorites, Film Noir, which has an “older woman” (ahem) in the lyrics… Not that I consider myself a cougar. REALLY what made me relate to the shirt was when they covered Pearl Jam’s State of Love and Trust (one of my FAVORITES), and I was so stoked, but all the little late-teens early-twenties kids around me just stood there. What?!?! That song is a classic! It’s awesome! I def. felt “older but bolder” at that moment. So I got the shirt. I love it. My sister’s shirt is just a regular Gaslight shirt though .

Here’s the setlist. They didn’t play my three favorite favorites (drive, elvis, and cassanova), but they got most of my other favorites in there. I was going to make a CD for my sister, which is why I noted every song on my phone during the show, but she has pretty much all the songs already and I am out of blank cd’s:

American Slang
Boxer
The Diamond Church Street Choir
The ’59 Sound
Old White Lincoln
Even Cowgirls Get The Blues
Bring It On
Miles Davis & The Cool
Red In The Morning
The Spirit Of Jazz (currently a free download on Amazon)
Angry Johnny And The Radio
Orphans
Blue Jeans And White T-Shirts
Film Noir
Stay Lucky
The Queen Of Lower Chelsea
Great Expectations

Encore:
War (Lucero cover, with Tim Barry – link is to a video of the performance!)
Boomboxes And Dictionaries
We Came To Dance
State Of Love And Trust (Pearl Jam cover)
We’re Getting A Divorce, You Keep The Diner
Here’s Looking At You, Kid
The Backseat