Back in 2014 I got to see Rise Against play at the House of Blues in Boston, which was amazing, and just recently I went to see grandson and K. Flay perform together.
I think these are my two favorite concerts I’ve been to, and the key factor seems to be the energy between the crowd and the band. It’s a thing that’s kinda hard to express in words, but for me that’s definitely what makes a concert go from good to great. It doesn’t need to be a high-energy thing necessarily, either: one of the best moments from grandson’s set was actually a really somber, lower energy song that he came down onto the floor to perform, and you could just tell that everyone was really invested in that moment.
What about you all? What takes a concert to the next level for you?
Concerts where every single PERSON in the room knows all the words to every song. That’s what really does it for me. Usually this is a band like The Front Bottoms or Pinegrove, it feels like their songs were made to be shouted back at them by an audience. That kind of energy is something that larger venues/shows have never been able to capture or compare to, imo.