Headspace was new to me, but that’s definitely an all-star cast. I’d actually been enjoying some sweet Rick Wakeman doodly-doos (albeit very briefly) on Ayreon’s The Theory of Everything near the end of work yesterday, so may as well follow it up today with Adam’s work. Appreciate the rec, and I’m enjoying myself with it 3 songs in so far.
Roy–embarrassing as this probably should be to admit–is kind of my personal style icon. He pulled off the sleek industrial goth aesthetic in a very light, but still theatrical, way that I appreciate and try to adapt into everyday wear when I can. And, of course, the fact that he was an absolutely killer vocalist and frontman was just sort of icing on the cake ;)
Never saw Opeth and DT together, though I did separately while in college. Both had stories associated with. . . in the lead-up to a Dream Theater show in Boston’s Orpheum Theater, I’d been playing an absolute ton of PS2 games and carting my memory card around w/ me in my over-the-shoulder bag to play at a friend’s dorm. I wound up losing the memory card out of it somewhere in the Orpheum during DT’s set, losing–among other things–about 60 hours of progress into Dragon Quest 8, which I never actually did finish thanks to that. I went w/ friends to see Opeth a couple of years later in Worcester–about a 2-hour train ride out of Boston with a notorious schedule that always had the last train booking it out of town right as shows at the Palladium theater wrapped up. We wound up missing the train–in the middle of Massachusetts winter–and were too broke to stay anywhere, so we just bummed around downtown trying to evade bums and cops alike until the first buses left the next morning at like 8.
The Blind Guardian show was genuinely otherworldly. They’re doing some recording on this tour for a new live DVD, and Atlanta was one of their major destinations for that purpose (also, coincidentally, a 7-hour hell-drive on Black Friday, but so fucking worth it). The crowd was packed and impossibly dedicated. Grave Digger did a great job warming everyone up; I’d basically lost my voice by the end of the set, which remarkably included like 3 songs from Excaliber, the only GD album I’m really familiar with. BG hit the stage and proceded to blow through a gigantic multi-hour set, including a fan-request for “Majesty,” which they’d genuinely not planned on playing that tour, from what I can see on Setlist.fm.
The real magic for me was that they actually played “Curse of Feanor” live, something I remember reading on the BG forums like 15 years ago that they never did. No idea what made 'em break from tradition and finally do it, but it was fucking incredible. There were multiple huge, lengthy audience sing-alongs, chanting out the final bars of tracks like “Valhalla” and “The Last Candle,” alongside of course “The Bard’s Song-In the Forest.” I literally destroyed my throat by the night’s end (18 songs, Jesus!); I was unable to do anything but rasp painfully the whole drive back with my gf.
The night was improved more by meeting a friend there I hadn’t gotten to see in years; in HS, I got him into modern metal via Blind Guardian, and his wife apparently bought him the tickets as an early bday present. All in all, my favorite show I’ve seen from them yet, and I can’t wait for the DVD to hit.
The more I type on this, the more I think I must have told most of the story on Qt3 already, but I can’t find it in this thread, so maybe it was elsewhere. Sorry for any unnecessary repetition ;)
