One of the best things about roping a bunch of prolific web bloggers into my show is that I get to read their take afterwards. Here’s Chris’s recap of Frostapalooza, written as only Chris could.
The way Brad envisioned it, it was a pretty damn big idea for a pretty damn big concert. Not just a handful of people, but forty musicians in all, rotating on and off stage, playing both original music and covers in a wide variety of styles. Like The Last Waltz, except, you know, in Pittsburgh and with less Martin Scorsese and more GoPros.
I was describing it as “The Last Waltz on anabolic steroids,” so yeah that checks out.
Yadda yadda yadda — I’m on a plane to Pittsburgh.
😂
Rehearsals were in Brad and Melissa’s
basementmusic cave.
That music cave was one the main reasons we bought our house, and we really put it to use! I’ve realized through this experience and others that some of the best moments in my life were spent playing music in various sweaty basements.
I actually didn’t have that much to rehearse, so I was mostly just hanging out. One of my jobs was to make sure that we had cool videos of visualizations to use at the show. See Jeff Robbins was there who makes software called Visibox. Brad’s idea was to have people make Pens and we’d project them during the show. People did that, so I sat around turning them into videos which is what Visibox needed. Jeff ultimately did 99% of the work getting Visibox doing it’s thing during the show, and it turned out super cool.
I am so thrilled with how the visualizations turned out for the show. Putting these animations together was very much a stretch goal kinda thing for the show, and Chris and Jeff brought it to life. Serious shout-out to Jeff who spent the show manning a computer to make the visualizations go. It definitely wasn’t my intention to put Jeff to work like that, but everyone absolutely loved the results. Seriously, check out Visibox; it’s really great software and I was incredibly impressed with how easy it was to set up and run.
Brad and Mellisa’s daughter Ella was on stage as a hype dancer for most of the entire show. Incredible.
One of the main takeaways from the show that “ELLA REALLY LIKES TO DANCE.” As her parents, me and Melissa already knew this but even we were surprised and impressed with her commitment to dancing throughout the entire 3-hour show.
The show itself was an unbelievable outpouring of energy and love. I couldn’t help but imagine if anyone in the audience had decided to go on a lark, not knowing anything about it, they would have been pretty damn impressed. This wasn’t just a couple of nerds poking around at instruments (except me), these were some serious musicians giving it their all.
This is a sentiment that was shared by so many people, and I’m so happy that came through because this effect was exactly what I was going for. I was truly the only person who knew ahead of time how talented all my musical family and friends are (yes Chris, that includes you). Everyone else, including the musicians, didn’t really know what was in store. It was so tempting to share some of the recordings before the show just to say “SEE! THIS IS SERIOUSLY GOING TO BE AWESOME!” But it would ruin the surprise. I’m so incredibly happy with the results; it seemed to blow everyone’s expectations — including my own! — out of the water.