The Ikon
Open My Eyes
World Wide Epiphany
Traverse City is situated in a lovely part of Michigan in Traverse Bay which has a couple of peninsulas on either side. All along the roads people were selling cherries from their gardens. The concert tonight was held at the National Cherry Tree Festival on a small headland beside the harbour and was another FREE concert! I got there at 7.15 and already loads of people had already staked out their plot by laying down blankets!
Kasim, Todd and Trey came on promptly at 9.00 for their one hour fifty minutes concert and the crowd loved them! Right from about the third song a group of obvious Todd fans at the front were dancing but by the encores virtually the whole (large) crowd were up!
As Todd explained, the first three songs are always the same "Give or take a song but now everything gets unexpected" and it was an unexpected order of the set list tonight as Hammer in My Heart was the fourth song whereas it's usually part of the encore.
Before # One Lowest Common Denominator Todd noticed a large building near the stage which he said may be a sewage plant as it looked like a blot on the landscape, until Kasim informed him that it was a brewery which made it look a lot better to Todd! Todd explained that he hadn't had any cherries himself yet but a couple of times asked if we had!
Todd seemed to deliberately wait until Kasim took his first sit down tonight before he played the intro to Trapped! Kasim was back to wearing his sandal type of shoe (which shows more plaster) and is sporting his third beard of the tour!
After There Goes My Inspiration (in which they kept a strong spotlight on Kasim from Trapped) they went into Couldn't I Just Tell You. Todd started the scissor dancing and Kasim (very briefly) joined in on one leg after carefully moving his guitar lead well out of the way first!
During Cliche (in Todd's Solo Spot) he had to stop and re-tune his guitar slightly and then at the end of the song, he removed a hair from his face so he ad libbed the line "A hair on my nose" several times!
Trey came back on stage as soon as Todd finished Bang The Drum but
Kasim didn't for quite a while so that even Todd was asking where he was!
Eventually he arrived and explained that his boot had come off so Todd
called him "Gimpy La Roo" (as he did several times back at the Westbury
concert a couple of weeks ago)! At this point Kasim's shoe came off
again and went flying across the stage so a tech helped him on with it as
Kasim was tripping himself up on his guitar lead at the time!
They played Secret Society again tonight (this track is becoming a
regular at this end of the tour) and before Yer Fast Todd said that they
are planning to sing this song on their appearance on the Letterman show
on 3rd August!
During One World tonight we had the punch and Traverse got the mention!
It was an unusual encore tonight as they played The Ikon followed by Open My Eyes which the audience really liked. Unfortunately Kasim's spotlight part of The Ikon only lasted 1.07 minutes tonight whereas it's often over a minute and a half.
After World Wide Epiphany Todd thanked us and said that we had all been "Cherry" tonight!
