Mar 07 Your Favorite Enemies Live in St. Albans

We need to load the van at 3:30pm today, and we are leaving our hotel at 4:00pm. It’s not everyday that we are allowed to leave so late, and after the show we had yesterday, I think we are all very happy to know we are having a little bit of time to get some extra sleep! We decided to gather all together in the lobby at 1pm, to have breakfast. Breakfast done, the guys started writing their post-its for the order on the YFE Store and for the new SFCC members – thanks to all of you, it’s quite crazy to see you embrace the moment and join the adventure the way you do!

We arrived at the venue and started getting our equipment inside. It’s crazy to think there’s absolutely nothing on stage before we arrive! We need to plug the amps, the footboards, set up the drums and keyboard… It’s like building our own sounds every time! It’s a collective effort to make sure that everyone enjoy this task, if only a little.

We played at The Horn previously, and when we arrived, the guys were surprised by how big the stage was! That was until they added the drum. They keyboard. The amps. The footboards and Sef’s spaceship. Then they remembered. The stage is indeed small…!

We did the sound checks and drove back to the hotel, where we ate a little… Fruits and vegetables, given to us by the promoters of the gig tonight. Yes, we surely are the only band to ask for fruits & vegetables on their rider! We took half an hour to rehearse the show in Alex & Ben’s bedroom, once again with acoustic guitars. It’s stripped down, but in a way that’s very different from the acoustic tour we’ve recently done. And already, in the room, we could feel just how incredible this show would be! For a very long time, the stress we felt before a gig was way more important than the excitement of it all…! But now, it’s different. There’s still stress, and I guess there will always be… But it no longer takes over the excitement of the present moment.

Arrived at the venue, we noticed something that was written on the wall…

“What would you attempt if you were sure you wouldn’t fail?”

It’s a quote that we have heard several times before, and that wasn’t new to us. But it seemed to be very fitting for tonight’s gig… I guess being in a band is not the answer that comes to everyone’s mind, and yet this is what we have tried… not that there was any guarantee of success when this all started. And I think that this is what makes this story so beautiful. If you are sure to succeed, if you know exactly what’s ahead of you, if you can tell with every details what will happen with every step you take, is it really worth trying it? When we started the band, we had no idea what was really ahead of us, we had no 5-year plans to conquer the world as Alex likes to say… But we jumped in anyway, because we felt it was the right thing to do. We met success we weren’t expecting. We met failures we weren’t expecting. We went the wrong way. We took curves we shouldn’t have taken. We stopped when we should have continued and went too far when it would have been better to stop for a little bit. We got lost. We fell down. We hurt ourselves. But we kept standing up. Because we knew that we were never alone. Could it have been different? Yes. Definitely. But the choices we made have always been ours, and they are the choices that we decide to assume every day. Because they have made us who we are today. We’re not perfect… we never will be. But we’re honest. And I think that this is the only thing that matters truly. What if we knew we wouldn’t fail? Well, I think we would have only taken the safe path instead of taking the one that shaped us the way we are right now. Would it have been better? We will never be able to say. But as long as we keep getting back on our feet after we stumble and fall, we will never be able to say that anything we do is a failure. And for this, we really have to thank all of you, for lifting us up when we thought we couldn’t do it anymore… We owe you a lot!!!!

And it is energized that we started the show… And I mean, very energized! It has been a pure let go, in which the band members have been joined by the people in the crowd in a beautiful way. Once again, it was loud, intense, real…! You could see the guys screaming on stage. All of them, without any exceptions – even Miss Isabel! Ben and Jeff have been jumping around absolutely everywhere on stage. It’s still unknown how they managed not to bump one another onto such a small stage. You could notice from the crowd the looks and smile that they exchanged with one another during the songs and in between them, brief moments filled with more than words could ever say… At one point, just before the song Open Your Eyes, Alex had trouble speaking, trying to catch his breath without much luck… But it didn’t matter much, and the next song just started, as intense as the previous ones. Alex climbed on the drums during From The City To The Ocean. The show ended with the song I Just Want You To Know… and with the band in the crowd, with Alex doing body surfing and filming the whole thing from his point of view with someone’s cell phone. It’s hard to put in words what exactly happened last night… I have attended pretty much every one of Your Favorite Enemies’ concert so far, but this one had something very special to it… Maybe because of the way they performed, but I guess it’s mostly because of the way I chose to listen to the songs… with the same let go they had on stage.

I hope those few pictures will help you understand and make you feel as if you had been there with us!!!

Stephanie

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