brian's blog

New Year's Eve was a blast. We started the evening out with dinner at Pellini's, overlooking the city from the 28th floor of the Renaissance Madison hotel. The food was decent, and the view was impressive. Afterwards, since the monorail is still broken, we caught a cab up to the EMP to party & see the Presidents.

The EMP was busy, but certainly wasn't packed, which made it easy to get close to the main stage. We wandered through all the exhibits (open for the evening), mostly ignoring the three stages until the Presidents came up to play. They were fantastic. They sound great live. In fact, they sounded nearly identical to their CDs -- they certainly don't seem to rely on studio magic. They put on a great, funny show. I enjoyed it more than any other concert I've ever been to.

I recorded a super secret video of them performing Lump; check it out here.

Around midnight, most of us snuck out of the concert and the EMP temporarily to witness the start of the new year up close in front of the Space Needle:

The fireworks lasted for 7 minutes, and were great to watch from up close, though most people who watched it on TV seemed to think they were somewhat underwhelming. For us, it was a tough to know exactly when the new year started since there was no dropping ball or other sort of marker to indicate when midnight hit. Still, there were plenty of people nearby watching it with us:

Overall, lots of fun.

All the best to everyone in the new year!