paisley party tour

this post is probably going to interrupt the "month in the life of a musician" series, but oh well.

last weekend justin was called to play 3 shows, friday, saturday and sunday with julianne hough. (the dancing with the star girl who went country but is now going back on dancing with the stars.) they played in st. louis, louisville and pittsburgh. since louisville (pronounced lull-vull) :) is only about 2.5 hours away, justin suggested that i come up to the show. i called some friends to come with so i won't have to drive by myself. colleen, ciara, mike and i left on saturday around 3:00. we got into louisville and found the convention center. not too hard to spot considering the lines and lines of cars trying to get in from every direction. we found the shortest line and got up to the gate. i tried to explain that justin had our tickets waiting for us at will-call. well the crazy parking-money-taker-lady wouldn't believe me. she said that they wouldn't let me in without a ticket. duh! that's why i need to go pick them up. so she called over another guy who also didn't believe me until justin called and i said, "here, this is my husband, the one in the band. why don't you talk to him." the guy asked what the nashville musician's union number was. after telling him it was 257-ha! he let us go. and we didn't even have to pay for parking. woohoo!

we finally met up with justin after about 5 people telling us we couldn't go into the arena yet-until we showed them our super special VIP passes. he took us to the catering room and we got to eat with the cool people. the show started at 8:00, so we found our seats... completely awesome by the way. julianne sang 5 songs and did really well. she has a really good voice. then chuck wicks sang 5 songs. in the middle of his set, justin came out and was able to sit with us. we stayed around for about half of jewel's set and then we went back stage to take fun pictures. ciara and mike also wanted to see julianne's bus and we all wanted to meet her. after mike was told "thank you for all you do" by some drunk old guy who thought he was chuck wicks, we got on the bus to hang out for a bit. hershey is the sponsor for the paisley party tour, so there was candy galore on the bus and everywhere else. i think all our purses were about 5 pounds heavier after we went back into the arena.

we got settled right before brad (we're tight now-first name basis) started his show. it was AWESOME! the production was amazing. he had this huge video screen that played images that went along with his songs. he is a really really good guitar player and it was so fun to watch. his band is pretty incredible too. there's this really old guy who looks like charlie daniels who can play guitar really really fast. the keyboard player also plays banjo and he's amazing on both instruments. during one part, they did an instrumental song and up on screen was a cartoon of all the band guys as superheroes. it was really funny and then at the end it said that all the animation was done by brad! not fair for someone to be that talented. we left a little early to try to beat traffic-that didn't really work, but we had a blast!