Sure, I attended the rare music festival here and there as soon as I turned 18 – but until now, I had never actually bought tickets to see a specific artist in the flesh until I purchased the two cheapest seats I could afford for Taylor Swift’s Reputation tour at the end of this year.
Then recently, I was generously gifted two tickets to go and see Vance Joy perform in his Nation of Two tour by a friend who could no longer go. So, I brushed up on some of my favourite Vance Joy songs before dragging my housemate along to the Hodern Pavilion at the Entertainment Quarter in Sydney.
We arrived shortly before he was due to start playing, expecting him to come on late – but he emerged on stage at 9pm on the dot. I was half expecting his voice to be muffled under the sound of the live music or for him to sound completely different altogether. But it was none of those – he sounded incredible.
Vance had the voice of an angel and the extremely talented musicians who were playing alongside him added something so much extra to the performance. For the next three days, I played his songs on my morning commute back-to-back, where I had a realisation – his music is so much better live.
When I listened to him singing in person, I could hear so much passion in his voice. Seeing the percussionist and bass-guitarist become fully consumed by the music they were playing and adding extra accents to some songs is just simply incomparable to now listening to his recoded voice and music in an artificial studio.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love his music and will continue listening to Saturday Sun on end until I get sick of it, but I will definitely be purchasing tickets for his next tour as soon as they go on pre-sale.
