This has to be close to the 10th time I have seen Matthew Good perform, but by far the show on Tuesday was the most entertaining one I have seen.

I’ve seen him at the Coke Stage during Stampede (live or die with the stuffed animals was awesome), really bad venues like the Palace (anyone else remember the power cutting out to the stage?) and Cowboys, down at Mac Hall, but last night was definitely a first for me… a sit down acoustic show at the Jack Singer Concert Hall, and he owned the stage from the second he stepped out there.

It was a pretty basic stage setup consisting of 5 “arms” of lights set up behind him, a guitar, and a microphone. He walked out in shadow to the pre-recorded intro of “Girl wedged under the front of the firebird”, took his position in the center of the stage, and the night was underway.

Born Losers got played fairly early which surprised me a bit, as the rock show formula clearly states current hit singles must be played in the encore. It turns out this wouldn’t be the only surprise of the night, as he slipped a brand new song into the mix which I thought at the time was just an extended version of Black Helicopter. Apparently it is called “Silent Army In the Trees” and in my completely biased opinion it was fantastic.

One other thing that surprised me was the relative silence when he was singing… I really expected people to join in on some of the songs, at the very least with Apparitions, but everyone was clearly just there to listen to him perform.

There was a good mix of performance with crowd interaction, and one of the things I love is when the artist breaks out from the canned rock star banter. He did ask how we were doing, but then went on a mini tangent about him wondering if he was performing in a third world country if he would get the same standard concert-goer response.

Throughout the night he would taunt us with his alcohol, asking at first “you guy’s aren’t allowed to drink in here, are you?”, then taking obvious pleasure in taking a sip. I’d like to think it was karma that came along and made him start having a mini coughing fit shortly afterwards to which he said between coughs “that would be the drink going down the wrong hole”

He made jokes about how old he was (somebody get that man a Rascal!), he talked hockey, politics, made fun of some yelled out song requests, and generally seemed very happy to be here.

The one point where he appeared slightly uncomfortable (to me anyway) was when he was doing the intro / setup to “She’s in it for the money”. Considering the content of the song and what it means to him, I think we can all understand why he might be that way.

This is one of those shows that could have been 6 hours and I don’t think anyone would have complained a bit. I can’t think of a song that I wanted to hear that didn’t get played, he was great in between songs, and the seats we had were amazing. After the encore he thanked us for having him (he did this at the end of the main set as well) and while we were giving him a standing ovation, he returned the applause and said thank you yet again.

Thank you Matt for a wonderful show.

The set list:

1: Intro: Girl wedged under the front of the firebird
2: Load me up
3: Strange days
4: Born Losers
5: 99% of us is failure
6: I’m a window
7: Silent Army In the Trees
8: Black helicopter
9: In it for the money
10: Sort of a protest song
11: Avalanche
12: Metal airplanes
13: In a world called Catastrophe
14: Primetime deliverance
15: Apparitions
16: True love will find you in the end

encore:

17: North American for life
18: Champions of nothing
19: Suburbia
20: Fine art of falling apart
21: Girl in the war

There are some more pictures on my flickr account (just click through one of the images in this post and you can get to them), and also many more in the fan gallery of the shows so far that is being run off his website.

Anyone up for a road trip to Banff… or Kelowna?