Rock & Roll Assessment: Hello Kelly Christmas

Last night was the fifth time I’ve been a part of a Hello Kelly Christmas show in Orangeville.

As a concept, I built the set around the idea of a reunion: I brought in various musicians form years past.  This wasn’t difficult considering that I’ve had 30 guys in and out of Hello Kelly over the years.  In all, 9 players graced the stage of the Hello Kelly show last night, appearing in 3 different “incarnations” that the band has toured as over the years.

Below, I’ll walk you through the set and identify what I thought were the Top 3 Highlights of the Show.

–

The Set List:

Bring It Broken
Won’t Back Down
Favourite Arcade
Cavalry
Sleigh Ride
Simple Love Song
Your Name in Vain
Fall Over Me
Paper Bag Princess
Encore: It’s Beginning to Smell a Lot Like Christmas

We opened the same the same way that we’ve been doing for past year with the latest incarnation of HK (myself, Mat and my brothers, Adam & Jacob) with me taking the stage alone and singing a portion of Bring It Broken gently and (intentionally) out of time. Then the rest of the band took the stage and, with more pomp than I expected, we bursted into the full band version. It worked quite beautifully, I thought. Hype and the power of Rock abounded.

Skipping forward to Favourite Arcade, which I would consider to be Highlight #1. This song was performed by myself, Josh, James, Mat and Danny – an incarnation of the band that (prior to touring with my brothers) was the most fun to tour with.  When we played Favourite Arcade last night, it was like the 5 of us had never stopped touring together.

Highlight #2 came in the next song when Ryan and Mike Donais joined Mat, James and I on stage for Cavalry.  After the bridge in this tune, we dropped down into a down section and allowed the audience a moment of awe as Ryan Donais (arguably the best drummer I know) let loose for a handful of bars of drum explosion glory. I would have hated to be the drummer to play after him …

But Jacob, my brother, actually rose to the occasion. He, Adam (my other brother, Mat and I played an acoustic-heavy version of Simple Love Song, followed by an acoustic version of Your Name in Vain and then Fall Over Me, which was Highlight #3.  Mat and I started the song with a hauntingly chilled-out first verse followed by a chorus full of vocal parts that push me into the stratosphere. After that came a pretty standard verse and chorus followed by a guitar solo of pure BUILD.  This was one of my few guitar solos of the night and I felt pretty good about it!

From there, we moved onto Paper Bag Princess, which has always been a crowd favourite.  Admittedly, I have missed playing this song with James, Josh, Danny and Mat – so it was a blast to finish this reunion show with a fun blast to the past.

(In more recent news: Our music video for Paper Bag Princess (Hey Elizabeth) is finished and I’m going to be releasing it on YouTube soon!)

–

After the tear down, I went out to eat with a bunch of the guys at McDonalds (I had a sundae) and then the party eventually moved to Boston Pizza.

One of the things that I’ve missed so very, very much while being in Nashville was the ability to see these super tight friends of mine back at home. What a beautiful Christmas present! All of the work, sweat, stress and frustration of the night was worth it!

To top it all off, I made a wonderful new friend! Nadine, a blogger friend of mine from Toronto brought along her friend Beth from Vancouver and we managed to stay up until 3:00am talking about all kinds of silly, interesting, inappropriate and poignant things sitting in that Boston Pizza both with my other friend Matt and his brother David.
Beth has incredibly perfect teeth, a mysteriously calming demeanour and wrote a very, very kind blog post about me and Hello Kelly that I appreciated reading very much. My RSS subscriptions and Twitter following lists just got one item longer.

–

So, as strange a feeling as this is, I feel like I can now legitimately close the book of Hello Kelly phase 1. This reunion show was a blast and I’m so glad it happened but it was also an appropriate and timely way to step forward into the terrifying unknown of PHASE 2. What will Hello Kelly phase 2 look like? I have no idea.
But I’ll let you know when I find out!

It’s beginning to smell a lot like Christmas …

–

francy