The last time Eric Hutchinson was in town I didn’t end up making it to the show because I was sick. The first time I saw him was a couple of days after the shooting at Sandy Hook and I wasn’t sure if I was up for the concert. Saturday night my anxiety was acting up and there was some sort of town trick or treat happening and parking was scarce. I almost turned around and went home to watch the livestream the venue was doing. Maybe the universe is telling me not to see him anymore. When he came out and said “Good evening, I am Taylor Swift” my suspicions were confirmed.
The tour he is on is the 15th anniversary of his album Sounds like This. Every night he will be playing it in its entirety but he started with a song from 2014 that was not on the album. He explained that he couldn’t just start in 2008, it would be too much for us, so he was going to work his way backwards and ended up doing a song from 2023 next – but explained it’s actually much older because Sounds like This is only 36 minutes long and he needed to add songs to his set when he was first touring because the set being 36 minutes long wasn’t enough and he wasn’t going to play everything twice. Slowly we went back, 2023, 2022, 2016, 2014, 2012 and then into 2008.
To set the scene, he tried to bring us back to 2008 and remind us of what was popular then. He went through a whole story about how we probably would have been at Best Buy and saw his album there to buy and got it and then a whole story about how we may not have even had a CD player in our car. There were a lot of young kids in the audience so he needed to make sure that they fully understood the time period. He also then went on to explain Perez Hilton and how he and his blog helped make the album as big as it was.
He then played the album in its entirety, in order.
To finish the night, he didn’t end up leaving for an encore but stayed on the stage. Then he explained about how once, in San Antonio, he left the stage and was getting ready for an encore and the audience left so he was no longer going to do that and he saved us all 40 seconds and we’d wake up tomorrow 40 more seconds refreshed. He did also note that it is true that him explaining that he wasn’t going to do it just wasted all the time he otherwise would have if he left the stage and came back.
He said he would be out at the merch table once the show ended but as I mentioned previously, my anxiety has been awful lately so I wanted to do nothing more than just get back to my car and get home. As I was leaving, a couple of women behind me were excited that the show was over before 10pm!
