Engaging Audiences

There's something phenomenal in experiencing a live performance. Seeing the intensity on a singer's face, seeing the speed of strumming, the speed of drumming, the beads of sweat developing under the hot lights. Seeing the emotion first hand is always an enlightening experience. But I find that there's another quality that makes a live show that much more amazing: an involved audience.

An audience that really seems to give a shit, I think, is one of the most amazing things you will ever find. When you find a group of people who are all actively engaged in a musician's work, you know you are in good company. The energy becomes palpable and contagious and moving. It sometimes gives me goosebumps to hear my fellow concert patrons chanting the words back at whoever is chanting them toward us.

I've experienced this a few times. The first time I conciously experienced it was during a Third Eye Blind show in October of 2005. It was at a university, so much of the audience was growing up during the peak of TEB's popularity. We all knew their songs. Most of the songs anyway. A few of the hits were played, but everyone was waiting for the same song: "How's It Going To Be."

Huddled together in a mass in the university's field house, a thousand-odd college kids jumped and cheered as those familiar starting notes rang through the air. "How's it going to be/ when there's no one there to talk to/ between you and me/ 'cause I don't care," the lead singer belts out. "How's it going to be?" chants back every single member of the mob. At one point, lead singer Stephan Jenkins had stopped singing altogether, but the crowd carried on the entire chorus, a thousand voices mingling together to deliver the words.

You know that's gotta make him feel good. I was able to record one of these moments on my phone, and though it's a crappy recording, you can still hear the crowd distinct from the band. It still gives me goosebumps when I listen to it. To know that so many people were sharing the same moment with the same (or at least similar) emotion is thrilling.

But perhaps the best example of when this happens is during a Dashboard Confessional show. Now don't put down the Dashboard. Chris Carrabba has an amazing ability to write a song, to write lyrics that connect with so many people. Yeah, so a lot of them are teenage girls. There's still a connection. And the live performance results are heart-melting and chill-inducing at the same time.

I also experienced this first hand. He probably didn't even have to sing. The crowd could have, and did, do it for him. He played and the crowd chanting his words back at him. Sometimes he couldn't even be heard. Amplified by a speakers, he was still the same volume as the hundreds of college kids who came out to see him that same October 2005 (some of who had driven in from the next state over just to see him... *cough cough*).

Perhaps the true test of popularity and "making it" is being able to play a show and end up not really having to be there. Everyone else is so willing to do it for you, you're the one who's singing with them. They're your words, but eveyone else knows them by heart too. They cared enough to learn them. And they enjoy them enough to sing them back at you, sometimes louder than you do, sometimes at the top of their lungs.


Examples for you listening pleasure:

This isn't the show I went to, but the set looks the same. The crowd is acting the same way, too.




Also not the show I went to. But it's one of the songs I heard. And this is what it was like to hear it.