Today, I prayed for the first time in years

I prayed not to the Christian god, but to Brendan Kelly! You see, my dad and Rod have kind of been asking and asking about where I'm going to college and I don't know what I want to do on the side of being a musician (preferably a drummer in a punk band or multiple punk bands). Going to college for music is stupid unless you want to be a music teacher and you don't need a college degree to get a part time job. Anyway, I'll let you know tomorrow if or not he answers my prayer.

So my plans for seeing No Doubt didn't work out. Instead of Katie and Megan going with me, it was just me and my aunt seeing three bands. But fuck, it was a good show even from the lawn. The first band was a Swedish band called The Sounds. I can still say that I've never heard a Swedish band that wasn't amazing. God, she could sing. Oh yeah, all of the bands were a bunch of guys and then a girl singer. Cute little thing they have for a tour. And the girl-boy ratio was probably backwards from how it is at punk shows. There were 23,000 people there (so Gwen Stefani said and she doesn't sweat on stage, so she must be magical) and I'd be willing to bet....18,000 were girls. So anyway, The Sounds were awesome. Paramore was alright, as I've always said they are. Just alright. They played two new songs. I liked the one because it was actually up beat. Not like semi-up beat how most of their songs are. It's so weird how they do that. It's like Haley only writes...songs about struggling and being proud of being herself or something. Kind of like Britney Spears and that "Stonger than Yesterday" song. Girl power ballads or something, but not quite "power ballads" in the way that the '80s were. Anyway, the one new song was actually poppy and up beat and didn't give you an uneasy feeling, so I liked that. And "That's What You Get" made me cry. I cried a lot. I cry when I see something beautiful and/or amazing. Being 20 years old, writing a song, playing it in front of tens of thousands of people (and not being the headlining band), and they sing your song right back to you...that's fucking amazing and I can't even imagine how Haley Williams feels when that happens. It's amazing no matter how little of an impression Paramore leaves on me.

Now at first, I was pretty sure everyone was there to see Paramore and not as many had come for No Doubt. I was wrong and glad. Just on a side note, I hate huge venues with seating and $45 t-shirts as merch. That's so stupid. But as I said, it was appropriately huge. $45 shirts are never appropriate. But No Doubt! Of course, I hadn't bought tickets to this show for myself. I bought two tickets so I could take Katie Mullan to see Paramore. You know the story. Well No Doubt made going by myself worth it. They were flawless. I cried on their first song because it was so perfect and because it moved 23,000 people. They started with "Spiderwebs" which is probably my favorite No Doubt song. Then they played "Keep On Dancing" or whatever it's called. Then "Underneath It All." To be honest, I didn't realize they had so many huge hits. They did "Don't Speak" and like...all of those songs that my aunt kept looking at me and saying, "I think I've heard this song." They were fucking great. Gwen Stefani likes to accept gifts from the crowd and ask the people in the pit what their signs say. One said "H U G ?" written on an arrow pointing down towards the person holding it's head. She took the sign, held it out next to her and said, "Well, come get it." So he got on stage, gave her a hug, and asked her to take a picture with him. She took his camera, turned with her back facing the audience, held him against her, and took a couple of pictures. I cannot even imagine that MySpace comments he will get from that. That also made me cry. Every band made me cry numerous times. I'm very emotional.

So anyway, there was this one part...the most fucking brilliant thing I've EVER seen. Gwen was introducing everyone in the band. She did this right before a guitar solo in the song. What happened was Adrian Young played this simple beat that kind of made you groove a little. She would say "All the way from ....., California! Adrian Young on the drums!" and he'd play this drum part that is played behind the guitar solo and then go back to his little beat. Then she introduced their horn/keyboard/singing/percussion-playing black people. The one shook a tambourine on top of the drums. When she introduced the other, he played a little progression on the keyboards over the drums and tambourine. Then she did the same with the bassist. Then the bassist introduced Gwen Stefani. Then Gwen introduced the guitarist and the whole thing was put together and the guitar solo was fucking incredible. Not that it was like the best guitar solo I've ever heard (it was definitely unique and very tasteful) but the whole way of doing it was the most fucking fantastic thing I've ever seen. Fucking amazing. Made me cry. On one song, they had some black guy play drums, Adrian played a little snare drum attached to him like a marching drum (it wasn't a marching snare) and they brought out a couple huge floor toms and the members from the other two bands came out and pounded on them. Then Haley Williams and the singer from The Sounds came out and sang the song with Gwen. They were fucking amazing. The stage looked awesome that they played on, their outfits looked excellent, the camera angles on the huge screens were perfect, the crowd was fucking amazing (aside from the smell of weed because everyone was smoking it), they played their songs flawlessly, they interacted great with the audience, and they had a big screen behind the whole band that just had video things that went along with each song and gave a lot of feeling to the whole thing. It was amazing.

That was my yesterday. I'm thinking about going to see my mom tonight since she was gone all last week and I never got to see her since she was at the beach. I'm a happy person. We played Mario Kart for 4 and a half hours on Saturday night at Jimmy's. God, that is one of the best memories of my life. We won like 1169 to 1167 on team battle against hard computers on 150 cc with items turned off. It was epic. You had to be there and I'm not going to attempt to tell you how amazing it was. I love Jim and Tim. Birthday party at Jim's this Saturday! Show in Martinsburg on Sunday!

love,
Kyle