Saw the fabulous show last night in Vancouver. Standing room only crowd of fervent fans packed the house. The opening act was Lenoa Naesse from London, England. She sounds a bit like Edie Brickell and writes thoughful,whimsical and lyrical material.

Ray was in fine form and his band utterly kicks ass. Bassist, drummer, keyboarda nd harmonica player and an amazing guy on guitar and steel guitar. All truly professional musicians and obviously enjoying playing together.

The evening featured almost the whole the new album, Gossip in the Grain, and plenty of numbers from previous albums, such as Send Me Flowers and Three More Days. The band played two encores are were clearly bowled over by the extremely enthusiastic crowd.

I'd highly recommend this one, folks. If you can get a ticket, that is.

 Tesseract wrote: 

Will do. It's a sold out gig. I got the tix from the venue manager who is an old industry contact. He's not even letting me pay for them!

We have tix to see Ray on November 8th. Really looking forward to it. I've never seen him perform before.

I keep thinking of this Ray.

 trekhead wrote: 
Having seen Ray perform around 8 times now he has never put in a bad performance. An extremely shy man who says nothing during tracks his voice is just stunning live. Have to say I'm rather disappointed with his new album. Three standout tracks only but the mixing on it is dreadful. His voice can hardly be heard on many of the tracks and trying to pick out his lyrics is extremely difficult.  It's not an awful album by any means, he even sings a song about Meg white but it's his earlier stuff I Prefer. Maybe his new one will grow on me in time.

But yes if you like him he's a must see live artist, one of the best I've seen.

 Tesseract wrote: 

Does his music translate well live? Better/worse?