Chantal Kreviazuk in concert

Raine Maida as the opening act with Chantal Kreviazuk on piano

Chantal Kreviazuk in Massey Hall

Chantal completely unplugged with no microphone, amplifier, or back-up

I went to go see Chantal Kreviazuk in concert on Saturday. Woo!! Go Winnipeg!!! I had seen her live before - at a free concert at Assiniboine Park (like a 10 min. rollerblade from my house). She's good live and I quite liked her most recent album, Ghost Stories, in addition to her older stuff. The concert was at Massey Hall.

The opening act was her husband, Raine Maida, the lead singer for Our Lady Peace. Chantal was on the piano, but in a hoodie to hide herself, but it was pretty obvious that it was her. After that, she came back to play her set for an hour and a half.

I taped part of one of the songs, but midway, one of the security guards told me to stop and threatened to kick me out, hence the abrupt end to the video. I was quite surprised at the audio quality of my digital camera. I expected the volume would've saturated the microphone and it would've just been crap, but it was actually quite good.

Ghosts of You

Her two kids (toddlers) made appearances. I couldn't tell if they were predetermined interruptions by the kids, but twice they came one and one time they sang. I'm pretty sure I wasn't the intended audience for the concert. She also was rather mocking about the encore, telling us that she was playing her last song, but if we wanted more that we should applaud and she'll come back. Encores nowadays are such a bastardization of what it originally made out to be. It used to be that encores were real and not scripted. Now you expect an encore and the artist typically saves one of their best songs for it. It's kinda dumb, but I guess it's tough to go against tradition.

Chantal came out and did a cool encore. For one song, she sat on the stage with just a guitar. No microphone, no amplifiers, no back-up. Just her voice. It was pretty amazing. She was able to project her voice throughout the entire place, even up to the second balcony. Everyone was completely silent and you will notice in the video that there's a long delay between the end of the song and the clapping to make sure that she was actually done b/c there would be no way that she could be heard over the applause. I wasn't sure if my camera would pick-up the sound, but again, it did a good job despite not being blaringly loud. There's only sound and no video b/c I had to hide that I was recording it :)

Far Away Unplugged (no video, just audio)