You didn’t think SXSWi was going to let the music panel have all of the FUN., did you? Our SXSWi correspondent, Whitney Van Cleave, is still down in Austin and she’s taking in as much as possible. Her day 3 journal at SXSWi laments her lost opportunity to scoop up Jigga tickets, but not all was lost.
“SXSW is always a hot mess of excitement and frustration when it comes to seeing the bands you want to and the bureaucratic process of accomplishing that among lines, lists, endless RSVPs and a general state of chaos. Such was the case last night surrounding the RedLaser/eBay party at Speakeasy featuring Austin’s own Okkervil River which, in comparison to the pandemonium of the Jay-Z tickets on Saturday seemed smaller loss, was still a bummer.
The saving grace however, was FUN. I caught their Bing-sponsored show at 219 West last night ahead of their two sold-out dates in Denver and all I can say is: get ready to get rowdy. Riding a wave of success after their hit single “We Are Young” was featured in a Chevy Superbowl commercial (in what I like to call the song that launched a thousand Shazaams) FUN played a raucous set to an unbelievably packed house of hip nerds eating the show up like blogger candy. In addition to their hit anthem, the rest of the songs in their set were we received extremely well but how could anyone not like a sound so, well, fun? Seeing frontman, Nate Ruess strike gold with FUN’s latest album Some Nights after the demise of The Format gives us the warm fuzzies too. To top it all off, he closed the encore with a delightfully disjointed cover of “Free Falling” as you can see in the video below. ”
Word and photos by Whitney Van Cleave. Ms. Van Cleave is co-founder of health-centric social startup, Feel Good Now in Denver.
