Warped Tour 2013!

Hello once again everyone!

     So glad to be blogging again! I thought I would start off the year by talking about my summer. This summer I went to my VERY FIRST EVER Warped Tour! For those of you who don't know, the Vans Warped Tour is a huge outdoor concert that goes on all day and tours all over the country. They have a variety of bands and genres of music that's performed. So I thought I'd tell my story and review the bands I saw.
     This year's "theme" was "The Best Day Ever" but for me this started off looking like the wost day ever. I was in Texas visiting my mom and the night before we had (admittedly this was a stupid idea) stayed up really late and the concert started at 11:30 am. Well, we knew we weren't going to get there as soon as it started but we were thinking maybe an hour or so into it. Well my mom gets up and she's kind of cranky because we only got a few hours of sleep. And on top of this she hasn't eaten anything since early in the afternoon the day before. Well to make things even better I have a four year old brother who on this day was not interested in being cooperative whatsoever, so that was stressing her out. Then I tried to curl her hair and for some reason that was not working out so that made her upset and then she had to take out the trash and there was a nasty, red, smelly, chunky goo in the bottom of the trash can. So basically this morning was going really badly. We left the house thinking to ourselves "okay we just need to get to the concert and everything will be okay".
     We drop my brothers off at my grandparents' house and head off to the concert. Typically it takes 25 minutes tops to get from my mom's house to the arena where the concert was in San Antonio. Well we are barely out of my mom's little town when we hit... bumper to bumper traffic! Well at this point we think that the universe hates us. Its about one o' clock in the afternoon and we are going roughly a mile every ten minutes. We see a sign that says "two lanes closed ahead". We try to stay positive and think "okay well maybe that means we'll be out of this soon". We don't get to where people are merging for another hour. My mom and I are freaking out and people next to us are staring at us as we are screaming and cursing whoever decided to close two lanes on the highway on a Saturday afternoon. Long story short: we left around one and got there around three.
     At this point I am very worried that I will have missed some of my favorite bands. Thankfully we got there just in time!

We took this picture right before getting to see Blessthefall! We only got to see them perform "You Wear A Crown But You're No King", "2.0" and "What's Left Of Me" but I was really surprised at how good they were live! I'd only listened to Blessthefall a little bit before going to Warped Tour but I discovered that I really like them because of their performance!

Immediately after Blessthefall was done, another of my favorite bands started playing on the next stage over... Chiodos! Chiodos was absolutely astounding. I really got into it for Chiodos actually. When I saw Blessthefall I was sort of just standing off in the distance and listening and watching, but with Chiodos I actually got involved! I got to see their whole set, too, which made me really happy. But I was also really really hot. In Texas, not only does it get up into the hundreds, but it is humid, which makes it seem even hotter. They opened with "The Undertaker's Thirst for Revenge is Unquenchable (The Final Battle). I'll admit that I don't know this song very well so I can't really voice an opinion about it, and the same with the next song, "Thermacare". But then they performed "There's No Penguins in Alaska" Which is one of their biggest and one of my favorite songs! It was incredible! And their next song, "Expensive Conversations in Cheap Hotels" was just as great! To be honest I even enjoyed the songs I didn't know simply because of the talent! They ended with "Baby, You Wouldn't Last a Minute on the Creek" which, in my opinion was the absolute best way to end their set.

By now it's blazing hot, my mom and I have already gone through about seven bottles of water, and we are scouring the place for shade. We rest for a while until Sleeping with Sirens comes on. So we are standing in a huge crowd and I start to feel very faint. I've been doing my best to stay hydrated but I still feel like I'm going to throw up or pass out! So we go and sit in some shade and of course, Sleeping with Sirens starts to play.
     They start off with one of my favorite songs ever, "If I'm James Dean, You're Audrey Hepburn" but I am still too nauseated to get up. I chug two bottles of water and I get up and get in the crowd and I'm totally fine! The next song they play is "Low" which is off of their amazing new album, "Feel". And then all of a sudden there was this amazing moment where Kellin talked about how he was really just a normal guy who wrote real lyrics and how that was easy to forget at things like this. He asked for just one song, "A Trophy Father's Trophy Son", for everyone to put down their cell phones and cameras and just listen and watch. It was so beautiful and so amazing and not once electronic device was out during that whole song. And then they played "Congratulations" which is also off of "Feel". I had not heard this song until this moment and I instantly fell in love with it! The next song they played was "Roger Rabbit". This song is so deep and emotional and beautiful that I just about started to cry! I was going to post my own personal video of this but for some reason it wouldn't upload...
But here's what it was basically like live:

Then they moved on to "Do It Now, Remember It Later" which was awesome. I believe I posted about that song before! But one of my favorite moments was seeing them perform "If You Can't Hang". It was indescribable! So I'll just let you see what it was like...

Immediately after they were done with this amazing set, I went and bought "Feel" because it's incredible.

     So after that my mom and I walked around for a few hours and came back to this stage to see "Bring Me The Horizon". I swear it was more of a packed crowd for them than for SWS, which for some reason surprised me. This was when things got crazy. I'll post a video for each song because this was by FAR my favorite performance.

     The song they opened with is now one of my favorite songs- "Shadow Moses". This was where the real moshing began! I hadn't heard "Shadow Moses" more than once before I heard it live and hearing it live was what really made me fall in love with it. Nothing will ever compare. 

 

They then played "House of Wolves" off of their newest album, "Sempiternal" and "Chelsea Smile" which is a song I have always loved and it was so great to hear live!

 

 Then came "Go to Hell for Heaven's Sake"off of the newest album "Sempiternal" (Shadow Moses is also on Sempiternal!) and like I said I had only listened to that album once but I fell in love with all of those songs immediately! They were even better live than they were recorded, so I'm glad I got to hear them live! It was during "House of Wolves" that Oli started a circle pit around the sound tent... I got a picture- let me know if you can see that circle!!

 

Then during "Diamonds Aren't Forever" he had two of his crew members climb into inflatable boats and "crowd boat" in a competition to go off the stage, around the white tent and back on to the stage. It was totally insane!

 

Another song they did from "Sempiternal" was "Sleepwalking" which was really quite beautiful and yet still hardcore.

Then my absolute favorite song of this set was "Antivist". People were just crazy and it was really fun and really awesome.

It was after this amazing performance that I became totally obsessed with Bring Me The Horizon! This performance turned me into a super fan because it was definitely the best overall and I will never ever forget it!
     I hope you enjoyed journeying through my Warped Tour 2013 experience. I think I truly lived the best day ever! I encourage all of you to go out there and do something crazy like I did because you might find out that you really really love it! I'm totally in a concert craze now and if I never went to Warped Tour I probably wouldn't have as much of a drive to do stuff like this and on top of it, I wouldn't have all these awesome memories with my mom.

Love to all,
-Autumn the Music Girl
P.S. Go and get Sleeping With Sirens's album, "Feel", Blessthefall's album "Hollow Bones" and Bring Me The Horizon's album, "Sempiternal" because they're all wonderful!

P.P.S
Sempiturtle-

Shoutout to my best friend and fellow BMTH obsessor- Emily!!