October 17 – 21, 2024
the travel
If you read my post from the Toronto shows, you know that I left off in Buffalo, NY, which is only about a 3-hour drive to Pittsburgh. However, without a car, and no easy train option, I ended up spending the whole day Thursday flying from Buffalo to Baltimore with a 2.5 hour layover and then back over to Pittsburgh. On the plus side, I got my Maryland crab fix at the airport and was able to knock out that Toronto blog post before everything got jumbled up with the next set of shows.
I had been to Pittsburgh before on the String Theory tour, and was in town just long enough to hit up the major tourist spots. Since then, a couple of my good friends from Nashville moved to the city, so I figured I needed to make another trip here and visit them and get a local’s perspective instead of the touristy one. My flight landed just in time for my friend to pick me up when she was done with work, and she took me to an incredible pizza place called Alberta’s. We split the anchovy and egg, tostones, and a white boy pizza, and it was all so delicious.
On Friday, we both worked from her house and then a few more friends got in town right before show time. On Saturday, we all slept in and had a lazy morning, then made our way down to the Heinz History Center gift shop. My youngest niece loves ketchup, so I grabbed a little gift for her and her sister and a ketchup bottle ornament for myself. We skipped the actual museum out of laziness, but it seemed to have some neat exhibits. Before the show, we made a stop for an early dinner at Mike’s Beer Bar downtown. I had to try the yinzer wrap since it wasn’t anything I could get at home, and I’m glad I did: kielbasa, pierogies, haluski, chives, and sour cream all wrapped up in a tortilla. I also tried a flight of sours, and my favorite was the Save Room: Pumpkin Pie from Hop Farm Brewing.
My friend knows I love ginger beer, so Sunday afternoon she took me to Jackworth Ginger Beer. They have a house made classic ginger beer, a 5% ABV version, and an extra spicy version. I ordered a dark and stormy with the extra spicy, and instantly wondered why that isn’t the default level of ginger beer bite. After drinks, we went back downtown to the Strip District. It’s a few blocks of various restaurants and shops and was pretty busy as there was a Steelers game later that day. A lot of the shops were closed by the time we got down there, but I didn’t have enough luggage space to bring much back anyway. I did pick up a few bags of freeze-dried candy from Grandpa Joe’s Candy Shop, and had one of the best meals of this whole tour from Luke Wholey’s Wild Alaskan Grille; I had a side house salad with lemon ginger vinaigrette, the spicy garlic edamame, and a captain crunch roll.
the shows
For most shows, it’s the songs that are most memorable, whether the mix of set list choices themselves, a rare deep cut surprise, or a particularly enjoyable performance of a song you’ve heard 100 times. For this pair of shows though, it’s more the strange than the “Weird” of it that stands out to me. But while we’re on the topic, let’s start with “Weird” itself: When a band plays a stripped-down, slow, quiet song, that is absolutely not the time to yell things out to the band for attention. Before starting the song, Zac made a point to say “now is not the time for “‘I love yous'”. Cue Taylor jokingly saying, “I love you, Zac!”, to which Zac responded “he’s the only one who can say that”. What this means is that it’s time to sit back, be quiet, and enjoy the performance. It’s not your excuse to scream “COME ON, ZAC!” at the top of your lungs from the back of the balcony approximately ten times throughout the song. And also, as a general rule, if you’re going to talk through an entire concert, please just save your $50+ and go to your local dive bar instead.
Back at the Church Studio show in Tulsa, Isaac stopped to tune his guitar, and Zac made a joke about how he never has to tune his drums. That happened again during the acoustic show in Pittsburgh, but this time he drug the joke out and pretended to tune his drum set for what felt like a couple minutes. During “Georgia”, Taylor’s piano was having sound problems; it was super quiet in the beginning, then way too loud in the middle, and finally back to a normal volume for the end.
Having John Calvin Abbey back as an opener, he was able to hop in on harmonica for “Dressed In Brown Eyes”, and it was a fun addition that I had missed from the RGB Tour. At the end of the song, both Andrew and Demetrius poured their water bottles out on his head, which gave me a chuckle but seemed to go unnoticed by everyone else. On night two, Alex from Phantom Planet also came out with a tambourine and joined the guys on “Lost Without Each Other”, which hadn’t happened at any of my prior shows, though my friend said the whole band joined in back in NYC. You never know what you’re going to get at a Hanson show, and I can’t wait to see what happens at the next.
Scream And Be Frees 