What I'm Not Listening To

I've been a fan of Metallica for almost my entire life. In April, 1999, I heard that Metallica had teamed up with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra to perform a concert in which they played Metallica songs with orchestral accompaniment. I've always been into the mixing of music styles, so I thought that this would be really cool. When I finally heard it, however, I hated it. To me, it sounded like a complete mess. It was like Metallica had sneaked into a performance of the orchestra, set up their amps and started trying to compete with them.Rish and I were having a conversation about it last week. Sting is going to tour this summer with an orchestra, playing arrangements of his songs with the full orchestra joining in. Sting stands side by side with Metallica as the other number one music act in my life. However, I was a little hesitant to buy tickets to the show, because of how poorly that experiment had worked out with Metallica. Rish asked me what I thought of the combination of Ben Folds and the Western Australia Symphony Orchestra, because he thought that for the most part it had worked out great, with only a few songs that just didn't weren't right. I had no idea that such a collaboration had ever existed. I decided I'd better check it out.

I did, and I enjoyed it _a lot_. Maybe it's just that Ben Folds style works a lot better with an orchestra than a heavy metal band does. Sting's music, though, would probably be placed a lot closer to Ben Folds than Metallica in classification. The one thing I thought, as I listened to the Ben Folds concert, was that it would have been totally awesome to have been in the audience for this show. It would have been an experience to remember forever.That decided it for me. I was going to the show. So, on Monday, when Rish and I got together to podcast, I told him that I was going definitely. I was excited.

Then late yesterday night, Rish sent me a link to a news item on a website. Sting show was no longer coming through town. Scheduling conflicts had canceled our tour stop. Dammit, that would have been an experience to remember forever.