First and foremost, I feel like it would only be appropriate to congratulate Sam Smith on his FOUR shiny new GRAMMY awards that he took home this past Sunday. I'm so happy for him and it is so well deserved.
On January 31, Sam Smith came back to the Bay Area for the second leg of his "In a Lonely Hour" tour. I saw him live when he came to Oakland the first time around, and was so happy to see that he was coming back already. As soon as I saw the date announced the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, I KNEW I had to see him again. His voice is absolutely beautiful, and is even better live. Tickets to his show was such a hot commodity (partly thanks to the scalpers out there). Basically, if you didn't get it during the pre-sale, you were pretty much out of luck unless you want to shell out at least 3x the face value price on StubHub. Luckily, I was able to get mine during that pre-sale.
Since it was general admission (which I really, really hate, to be honest, for numerous reasons), one thing was for sure - I needed to get there early in order to actually see his face (I was sitting at the very last row possible last time!). My sister and I got there around 3pm, and there was quite a crowd already, but thankfully, the time didn't go by too slow. And as you can tell, I found myself in a pretty darn good spot on the floor.
For this second leg of the tour, Sam got a tad bit fancier with his stage set. With a voice like his though, you don't really need all the fancy shmancy stuff. All you really want to do is focus on him and his voice. Any big production probably would've taken some of that away, so I'm glad he kept it simple.
Sam sang pretty much all of the songs off of his album, and then some. He stripped down a few of the songs, which I think showed off his vocals perfectly.
Trying to meet him after the show is nearly a guarantee if you're quick enough and know where to go. If he knows he doesn't have time to come out, he lets us fans know via Twitter (as he did when he came to Oakland). And trust me, that was a goal of mine. Luckily, there was a couple of people rushing through the crowd to get out, and I was able to drag us out of there fairly quickly by using them as a guide. When we got to where Sam would come out, the crowd was very small (no more than 10-15 people, I'd say, which of course grew later).
After waiting for what seemed like the longest hour, Sam came out to greet us. It went by kind of quickly and I couldn't get a picture with him, but I'm glad I at least got his autograph. When he first came out, my immediate thought was, "Wow, he is tall." "AND handsome." *Sigh*
I don't know when he's coming back again, but you can bet that I will be there waiting for him, even if it's the dreaded general admission.
Anything for you, Sam.