Mandy Moore / Paula Cole, The Fillmore, SF, 8/22/2007.
It was Mandy Moore's first concert ever in San Francisco -- "at the Fillmore, can you believe it," she asked. I think a smaller venue would have worked better. Some people on Last.fm commented with surprise about my going to a Mandy Moore concert. But friends know I have a soft spot for pop. And yes, J-Lu dragged me there, but I do like her latest album: Wild Hope, is a remarkably strong bid for singer-songwriter status; it's a solid, if safe, collection of sober, mature folk-pop that gets better with each listen. It's a far cry, in any case, from her old teenybopper days, which is something clearly reflected in the setlist. In any case, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. My only complaint: I honestly thought she was the headliner, but I was wrong (see more below).
The setlist, probably not in the proper order:
- Slummin' in Paradise
- All Good Things
- Looking Forward to Looking Back ["a politically correct way of saying goodbye to a relationship"]
- Moonshadow [Cat Stevens cover from Coverage]
- Wild Hope
- Ladies Choice [co-written with Rachael Yamagata, who apparently just ended a relationship like Mandy did]
- Extraordinary [one of the last songs written for the album; preceded by stage banter about giving up coffee and drinking green tea instead, but being tempted to drink a beer with the guys in the band]
- Can't You Just Adore Her
- Help Me [Joni Mitchell cover from Coverage, plus Mandy playing an air guitar and rockin' out with a tambourine]
- Nothing That You Are ["When I get angry, I write a song. So watch out"]
- Few Days Down
- Gardenia [she told a story about recording this in what sounded like a desacralized church, with nothing but the lights out, candles, a pianist, and her mic. This was as close to a show stopper as the set got]
- Umbrella [Rihanna cover from, well, all over the net. As if the audience hadn't been yelling "Um-ba-rella, ella, ella" the whole evening. "Who would have known the lyrics were so romantic? You break it down and it's just so romantic. This is just a song I would only groove to when it played on the radio, you know?"]
- Candy ["This song has no meaning for me," she said, "but I'll sing it for you anyway because we made a connection and I love you guys," or words to that effect, which she described as "a crappy pop song from 1999".]
(About Paula Cole: I saw her open for Sarah McLachlan back in 1995, right after "So Ordinary" was released. She played, all unshaven and tambourined, with a lone guitarist, and I wasn't particularly impressed. Neither was I on this particular date. In any case, she made the grievous error of talking, very early on in her set, about her seven-year hiatus, and proclaiming that she wasn't interested in shifting "units" or making sales, and that she really just wanted to bring her music to us -- "us" being the 100+ people still left in the venue once it emptied out after Mandy Moore finished her set. I have never seen an audience that small at the Fillmore, not even during cleanup time. Even one of the employees told me herself that "this [attendance] was pretty bad.")
Posted by the wily filipino at August 23, 2007 12:35 AM