Just got back from seeing
Aimee Mann at
The Birchmere (with a tip of the cap to our friends
the Fillios for pulling emergency last-minute babysitting duty).
Sure, I would have preferred it be the full band thing with a drummer, like we saw 05/24/05. At 90 minutes total (inclusive of a 4 song encore), it was also kind of a short show for the money. Still, the woman knows how to rock a room. She's got a real natural style and she's tremendously genuine. It doesn't hurt that she was playing with some outrageously great musicians (keys and bass mostly).
The last song of her real set involved taking roughly eight volunteers from the crowd to play various percussion instruments to back her version of "Frankenstein" (no relation to
the Edgar Winter song of the same name). If we had gotten to the general-admission show about 30 minutes earlier, I'd have been up there. Getting there late means you sit all the way in the back, and that's a hard connection to make.
I'm sure I'd have been stuck playing the
guiro anyway.