If anyone's interested, these are the blog posts I made about the other 2 times I saw Sondre in concert... but I'll only let you see it IF you know my tumblr URL, since I've shared the link to this blog with people I know IRL (just put it in before the slash):
/post/131414263203
/post/159897883813
Last time I saw Sondre in concert I got him a cactus blossom scented candle, which was a reference to his obsessions with cacti (also my Twitter handle) and scented candles. I wasn’t sure how I would top that this time around. I know his thing right now is burgers, but I didn’t know how to make that into a gift. As a last ditch effort I made a purple and blue bracelet that was shaped like a DNA for him but I wasn’t sure if I’d actually give it to him since he probably gets a lot of bracelets from teenage fans…
I wore the Sondre t-shirt that I bought at the last concert, but I don’t think anyone noticed, because it’s literally white text on a white shirt. I also brought my entire Solo Pleasure vinyl for him to sign. I was just planning to carry it around the whole time (aka, make my dad carry it for me) - kinda difficult because it was raining outside…
The concert was pretty early in the day, it started at 7:00, so my dad and I got to the venue at 6:16 and RIGHT AWAY we saw Sondre walking through the bar outside the concert room. (He was wearing a red t-shirt and black jacket, which was notable because he was wearing something different later.) We waved to him and he recognized us right away from the last concert. He shook both our hands and I was not sure what to say but my dad told him he should come to Chicago more often. I was holding my Solo Pleasure vinyl that I’d wanted him to sign after the show, and he offered to sign it right there. I just said “So cool to see you!” as he walked into another room cause I couldn’t think of anything else.
Then we waited in a “line” of like 5 people outside the concert room for the doors to open at 6:30. For real, nobody else cared enough to get there early. We walked in and were surprised to see chairs. We’d seen another show (Aurora Aksnes) at that place (Schubas) and there weren’t chairs that time. We sat in the very front row because we could. We tucked the vinyl between our chairs so we wouldn’t have to deal with it for the time being - thankfully, we didn’t forget to bring it home after the show.
A nice woman talked to me as we waited for the show and I told her, like, my whole life story. She was like, “You seem kinda young!” and I was like “Yeah, Sondre has been making music since before I was born.”
And then the show started when Sondre ran out from not the backstage but the back of the concert room and jumped onto the stage - very professional! The first song was “Track You Down” which was pretty much the only kinda ‘rare’ song in the set.
I didn’t take a video of every song like I did last time because I didn’t want to look like an obnoxious freak, but I did film a few good moments. Let me know if you want to see the videos, I don’t feel like uploading them.
The whole show was just like a conversation with the audience because there were literally like less than 40 people in there, and people just casually said things to him between songs and he would reply.
I then realized that I spend way too much time thinking about Sondre because he was telling all the stories behind his songs and I’m just thinking… I already know these stories. All of them. For example, he said “I’m gonna play a song that is explicitly about masturbation” and I already knew it was going to be “Single Hand Affairs”. Well, I did learn one interesting thing. He said he wrote “No One’s Gonna Come” about the girl he sang with on “Modern Nature” (Lillian Samdal).
Since he started with playing songs from his first 2 albums, he said he might try out doing a show in a chronological order, but that didn’t work out because he started playing Pleasure songs in the middle of the show. He also said he was trying to start performing all his songs without a guitar pick, but in the middle of “Two Way Monologue” he paused his playing to reach in his pocket and take out a pick and said he would only use a pick for that song. But he actually did play with a pick on other songs, too. Other songs had interruptions because he just forgot the lyrics and had to pause to remember. The best one was in “Violent Game” when he started singing “A subway cries out somewhere there’s / A subway…” and just stopped playing altogether to say to himself something like “A subway? Really?”
I wanted to sing along to all the songs since I know all the lyrics, but nobody else was doing it, so I stopped. Every time I started singing along, the woman who talked to me before the show looked at me weird. Also when he performed “Modern Nature”, people didn’t start singing along until after the first few verses which was weird.
And then he mentioned something about requesting songs, and people in the audience started shouting song names, so I took the opportunity to yell “Weakest Spot!”, a song that I requested on Twitter and he liked my tweet. (It’s an extremely obscure song from an EP he released ONLY on CD on his 2008 tour.) Since he mentioned requesting songs, I was scared that he was actually gonna play “Weakest Spot”, and I was just thinking, if he plays it, I am gonna film the WHOLE thing. But he didn’t, lol.
For the encore, he took the mic and said “Now I’m gonna do 10 minutes of stand-up”, but that wasn’t true as he started singing “Human Hands” a capella. He went into the audience and sang right in people’s faces… including me, near the end of the song. I just sang along with him. There was one guy that had a totally dramatic reaction when Sondre sang to him but I just tried to keep my cool. And then the nice woman next to me started punching my shoulder and squeezing my knee and I was embarrassed.
Then we started to get in line to greet him. There was this one old guy who asked us if we brought a candle to the last show, because he said he recognized us because he was behind us in line that time. That was cool, but this guy also seemed very judgmental that I was even there, because he asked how I even got in since it was a 21+ show. My dad just explained that it’s okay as long as I have my parent with me, and then he told the story of how I was only 12 when I saw Sondre in concert for the first time back in 2014 and I think both that guy and I cringed. Also, age restrictions at concerts are DUMB.
I asked my dad if I should give Sondre the bracelet I made, and he said no, and I was like yeah, this is dumb. We didn’t buy any merch because my dad said he didn’t want to spend any money, and anyway there were no scented candles or custom t-shirts left, which is all I would’ve bought.
So when I got to Sondre, I started with “Great job at the show!” which was a little awkward. I then read him a message that one of my twitter friends from the UK wanted me to tell him. Then we took a picture. When my dad took it, he handed me the autographed vinyl and told me to pose with it, which I didn’t really want to do but I was like Okay!! Once again Sondre put his firm grip around my shoulder and posed for the picture. TBH, I’m cuter than Sondre in the pic, he is not looking his best here. And then I took a selfie with Sondre and my dad. Another guy offered to take another picture from farther away, but I nervously said no to his offer, and then we left.
I wouldn’t rate our interaction this time around as highly as I would rate the one in the 2017 concert, lol. I was just overall more awkward and didn’t have a lot of interesting things to say. At least our picture is less blurry though, lol. Sondre also liked my social media posts and replied to them with flower emojis, which made me wonder if he did that because I was wearing a flower headband at the concert, but I kinda doubt it.
And then we got on the bus back home and I got motion sickness because I kept looking at my phone, which is basically a bad dizzy feeling that you can’t fix…
But yeah that’s what happened!! Sorry, this was really long, didn’t meet my goal of brevity.
