Home for the Holidays

Thanksgiving is a holiday of homecoming, reuniting with old friends, and a few good drinks. All that was found at the Mason Jenning's concert at First Avenue. While Mason Jennings has found moderate success nation wide, in Minneapolis, he is Mason F***in' Jennings! The crowd sang along to every single song and showered him with applause. Mason returned the favor by playing songs off every single album, played for a solid hour and 45 minutes without break, and concluded with five song encore, 3 of which were crowd requests.

I gathered at the venue with 3 friends from college. The four of us had last united for a Mason Jenning's concert seven years ago at Ritche Auditorium at SCSU. At that time, Mason played with a band, and Haley Bonar opened for him. Mason Jennings seems to have exceptional taste in opening bands:




This time around Mason no longer performs with the Mason Jennings Band. He was accompanied by local guitarist Jacob Johnson*. Johnson has played locally with other bands, including Tapes N' Tapes (I'm not certain, but the guy playing guitar in the Haley Bonar video looks an awful lot like Johnson as well). He himself was fun to watch perform! While Johnson mainly played the guitar or bass, Mason was all over the stage, playing the piano, harmonica, guitar, autoharp or drums.


Opening band, The Pines, sounded great, and also pitched in towards the end to accompany Jennings as a complete band. Jennings also invited a friend up on stage to beat box to one of his songs. Jennings also accompanied The Pines on one of their songs playing the drums and sang a verse.

Not only did Jennings fully represent his career from beginning to present (including two songs from his Minnesota album), he also found a little time to cover Chuck Berry's 'Johnny Be Good', the Ramones' '24 Hours Ago', Woody Guthrie's 'Hobo Lullabye', and a traditional Hawaiian song played on the autoharp.

Jennings ended the night by inviting concert goers to stick around and visit for awhile in back. True to his word, he stuck around and visited for awhile. My friend C and I stood next to him for awhile, but moved on once we started to feel a little creepy and realized we probably didn't have much to talk about with him.

Thanksgiving is really about being home and spending time with the people you love. And that's what this show was. There is a second show scheduled for December 30th at First Avenue- you should go check it out!





Mason Jennings (Featuring Zach Gill) - Living in the Moment - Live in Studio C from Cities 97 Radio on Vimeo.


*Jacob Johnson should not to be confused with John Jacobson (pictured below)... although such a confusion shouldn't be bad for his career...