Lee DeWyze Sacred Heart Fairfield, CT

Wednesday night American Idol winner Lee DeWyze performed at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT.  I won tickets from KC101 and met up with my friend Kat to wait in line.  We got there around 3:20 and saw that no one else was in line so we decided we might as well start the line and grabbed the chairs out of the back of my car!  Not too long after we were joined by Stacey and Jamie and the line just began to continuously get longer and longer.  But we would be front row!

It was pretty cold out and was snowing, but fortunately we were covered. At first I had thought that we’d have to just sit outside in the snow and freeze, so I was really happy when I saw that we’d be in a covered walkway. At least then it wouldn’t be quite as cold.  At 6:30 we packed up our chairs and waited for doors at 7pm.  (Which of course opened a bit later than that!)

As expected, we got front row 🙂  Although there was a huge space between the stage and the seats.  I was a bit concerned that people would rush the stage and take front row away from us, but fortunately everyone stayed in their seats!

The opening act was Jeff LeBlanc.  His name looked very familiar to me and I think that he was in the OurStage contest to open up for Hanson in Sayreville, NJ last July.  But I couldn’t remember if he was one of the good performers or the bad.  I enjoyed his set though, so he must have been one of the good ones!  At one point he was recording and looping different guitar parts so the song would sound,  I guess fuller, and that is always pretty cool.

Then there was a VERY short break (it was like 5 minutes and I was kind of shocked that it was so fast) and it was time for LEE!  He walked out with a little pedestal and put his root beer on it and then his bottles of water, all while singing along with the intro music that was playing.

He started his set with Earth Stood Still.  I’ve only listened to his album a handful of times so for the most part everything was new to me.  It was easy to tell which songs were his singles because they seemed to have the loudest sing-a-longs.  There was a lot of “I LOVE YOU LEE!” going on in the middle of songs and responded to each one.  One was a guy and he just laughed and said he wanted to meet that guy and that he loved that guy. At one point a small girl (4 or 5 years old I’d say) yelled out that she loved him and he had to stop playing and he was like “seriously?” It was cute.

During one of his last songs, I think it was Naked As We Came, he broke a string on his guitar.  Apparently he only had one guitar with him so Jeff had to give him his guitar to finish the show! He commented that Jeff was much taller than he was.  Then it was time for his “last song” Beautiful Like You, his newest single.

After that he walked off the stage for about a second and then came back out for an encore and joked about how he didn’t really sell that well.  And he finished out the set with Hallelujah.  He had called everyone to come up front for that song but unfortunately everyone rushed down there before I even had the chance to jump up and claim my spot against the stage! That’s ok though, I probably would have been trampled if I tried.

We decided we’d go to see if we could find where he was going to leave from and found the door to backstage and then around the corner saw a crowd of people waiting.  A woman came out and said they were at the wrong door and a second later one of the security guys peaked out of another door nearby.  We all went near that door and I was leaning against the wall right next to it and who pops out but Lee!  He said he would have liked to hang but they had to get a flight to Iowa in a couple of hours so he had to head out right away.  He took a couple of photos and gave a few handshakes and hugs before heading back in the door.  We wandered around a bit longer and security was asking for the hallway to be clear so of course we knew that meant he’d be leaving that way.  And he did.  He said bye to us all again down the hall and then went out the door.  Security wouldn’t let anyone follow him out the door.

I went in to the day not really being a big Lee fan – but now I love him. Many thanks to Kat and Stacey for showing me the error of my ways!

Setlist under the cut!