Fanfarlo @ the Great American Music Hall
On last Monday night I headed up with a bunch of friends to see Fanfarlo in concert at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. I wrote about this wonderful band earlier, and if you haven’t checked them out yet I encourage you to do so — got all my roommates and more friends listening to them out here. It was a bit chaotic because people were all coming up from different directions and times, but six of us made it there early enough to get some Korean food (Michael was dying for some bibimbap). We got to the venue in time for the last few songs from the opener. We also met up with Joey, his girlfriend, and more folks from Apple, and I went and got Wendy from the 2nd floor balcony.
photo by John Shen
It was great to see Fanfarlo live — especially to see how much (or how little) of the instrumentation you hear on the tracks translate to the live performance. The songs have a lot of great rhythm to them. The band played briskly through their set, pulling in a few songs from older EPs. They came back for a quick encore, which ended in a rousing edition of Fire Escape. We milled around after the show, taking in the music hall. It’s neat with these small bands — the bandmembers just came out after the show into the audience area and mingled with people.
The journey home took a few turns. I accidentally ended up on the Bay Bridge after dropping John’s friend off, and ended up doubling back via Treasure Island. We actually stopped and took in a great nighttime view of the San Francisco skyline, glowing in the darkness.
This was the first concert I had been to in a long time, and hopefully just the beginning of a good year of events.