The Fray!

Just realized I never finished blogging about our Fray concert! Mark and I have been meaning to cross this off our "Living in LA" bucketlist: Go to a concert. So glad it was with one of our favorite bands in a tiny little venue. :)

Let me tell you a little story about the Fray. I first heard the Fray on the radio when I was driving out to California for the summer (it'd been a really rough winter and I just needed to be by the beach for a couple months). They had two big songs at the time, Cable Car and How to Save a Life. Once in a great while you hear a song for the first time and it's love at first listen. I instantly fell in love with both. I became obsessed with a band that I didn't know the name of (these were the days before ubiquitous smart phones and I didn't have internet in my apartment yet). I got excited to get in my car, just so I could hear those songs again (told you, obsessed).

Maybe 5 days after I moved to California I went to institute where I met a guy named Josh that recognized me from a chemistry class at BYU and his roommate Mark. We all hung out that night after institute and on the drive to a restaurant Josh put on one of his favorite songs by a band named...the Fray. I sat in the backseat (such gentlemen apparently, making me sit in the back) and listened while Josh and Mark sang along with my new favorite song (both have beautiful voices, I should add).

Josh soon moved back to Ohio and Mark and I spent the summer singing along to the Fray and falling in love (I also got to sit in the front seat).

Fast forward almost 6 years, one courtship, marriage and kid later, Mark surprised me with an early V-day surprise: tickets to the Fray! Yay!!!! I was so excited. Mark's a member of their insiders club so he got first dibs on some tickets to a really intimate concert at LA's iconic Troubadour. Oh yeah and they were only $30. There were only maybe 150-200 people on the stage level of the club. The Troubadour had a really cool broken down old Hollywood vibe. Here we are before the show started:
This is a picture taken with my phone, it's not zoomed, we were really that close. It. Was. Awesome.
Most of the crowd seemed to be college kids and teens with a few parents (Mark stood next to a young girl we affectionately named, Superfan, who knew all the words to every single new song from an album that only came out 4 days beforehand and her boyfriend, Bieberhair. He was very, very stoned, which was probably the only way he was able to cope with Superfan's...enthusiasm.) Due to the young nature of the crowd when Isaac asked the crowd if they'd heard of Emmylou Harris, only me and about 2 other people said yes. They performed a cover of her song Bridge to Birmingham. Thought my mom would appreciate the picture:
One last picture from one of the best dates ever (going to be hard to top, husband).