One afternoon in early February, Nick was listening to some streamed music while he cooked. A song came on (this one, Future Politics) by a band I now know is Austra, and I was online in a flash, finding out who they were and when we could see them perform live. The reason I know this happened in early February was that, to my dismay, we had just missed them in concert at The Mod Club in late January. I also discovered that the band was based right here in Toronto.
I’m not sure how I missed them since their synth-pop sound is right down my alley, but I sure wasn’t about to miss their show at The Velvet Underground that happened last Thursday.
I’d bought us tickets for the show as soon as they’d gone on sale, and then held off telling Nick about it because I was planning to surprise him for his birthday. I did tell him we had a date on the 14th so he wouldn’t double-book himself, but that was all I said. Then, on the Wednesday prior, I reminded him that we were going out the following night. He turned to me and said, “I know … we’re going to see Austra at The Velvet, and I’m really happy about it.” He’d seen the sign outside the club and had figured it out immediately. Oh well, so much for my surprise!
(Readers might know, based on what I wrote in this post about tiny Christmas stockings, that I have more concert tickets for Nick, for another band we’re both into. I had to ruin the surprise on those too, because he was also going to buy tickets! Additionally, my sweet friend Andrea recently surprised me with the gift of a concert ticket, sending a card in the mail announcing we were going to see a singer I love. That will be three concerts within a short time span, which is completely fine with me since seeing live music is one of my very favourite things to do!)
The show was the last of an extensive tour in support of their new album, which took them all over North America, Europe and Britain. So, we were treated to a band that was extremely tight and sounding fantastic. No doubt, Nick was very happy to receive this gift of an excellent experience. And, of course, I was very happy to have joined him.
Thank you for reading,
xo loulou
