(Obviously, this entry has been delayed by other events.)
Last Friday night, my parents and I went to the Lyle Lovett Acoustic Ensemble performance at the Krannert Center. Overall, it was an excellent performance to attend. Lyle played a wide range of crowd favorites from all his albums, with some wonderful solos by the individual players. Between songs, he would banter with the members of the band, including Viktor Krauss.

Being a Champaign native and a University of Illinois graduate, Viktor got a very enthusiastic reception from the crowd, though he was visibly nervous, trying to hide behind the neck of his bass and quite hesistant at first to use the mic when answering questions from Lyle. He opened up after a little prodding and got several more rousing rounds of applause.

Lyle also included some background on his song writing process, including an old college roommate that used to tell him that many of his songs weren’t about something that should be put to song, probably best embodied by Penguins on I Love Everybody. He explained the song was insipred by a girl he met in college that had her entire apartment decorated with penguin items; the curtains, the slip cover on the couch, the salt and pepper shakers, etc.

I would highly recommend the Tryon Festival Theatre for performances such as this, there didn’t appear to be a bad seat anywhere and the sound was excellent. Our seats were on the right end of a row but they were still excellent. With only 950 seats, it’s a very intimate venue with the sound quality of a much larger hall.