Matt Nathanson at The Fillmore NY, Irving Plaza.

If you've never been to a Matt show...you've gotta. They're indescribably fun: part sing-along, part story-time, all loud, anthemic, poppy-rocky goodness. Plus, Matt's latest CD "Some Mad Hope" is album-of-the-year-so-far in my house.

Opening the show is one Cary Brothers, whose gruff brand of earnest folk-rock I probably would have been really, really into 15 years ago (700 Miles, Blacksmith Union, a hundred other bands nobody remembers but me), but tonight, packed shoulder to shoulder with a couple hundred college kids (and three of the loudest drunk chicks on Earth), I'm just not in the mood.

Then Matt and band take the stage, and all the pain just goes away.














Set-list:

1) Car Crash
2) Wedding Dress
3) Bare
4) Angel
5) Pictures of You / I Saw
6) Princess
7) Come On Get Higher
8) Tonight I'm Yours (Don't Hurt Me) / Pretty the World
9) To the Beat of Our Noisy Hearts
10) Bent / Anna Begins
11) Falling Apart
12) Still
13) Suspended (solo, acoustic)
14) Bulletproof Weeks (solo, acoustic)
15) Gone
16) Heartbreak World
17) Don't Stop Believin' [...oh Matt, I love you but sometimes I hate you so much...]
18) Laid [...and sometimes I just plain hate you...]
19) Detroit Waves / Paint It, Black [...but I can never hate you for long...]
20) Answering Machine

Encore:

21) Romeo and Juliet (solo, acoustic)
22) All Been Said Before (solo, acoustic)
23) All We Are