Why I Like Travis

Last night, in celebration of Jeff being done with Step II of the Boards, he told me we were going out to eat at some Italian place in downtown D.C. that had been recommended to him by our friend Nick Alder. We took the metro and then had to walk a couple of blocks to find this place.
When we finally got to the address that matched his post-it note, let's just say I had my doubts. It looked pretty scary. It was a grungy-looking brick building with one little set of couble doors in the corner and there was a huge line of people trailing out the door and down the block. My first impression was that it was a bar...or maybe...some sort of homeless shelter? Anyway, in my head I was thinking, "That is not an Italian restaurant. I am not going in there, no matter how good Nick said the food was." But Jeff insisted this was where we were going and that it "must just be a popular joint." Then he pulled a couple of tickets out of his wallet and said, "I guess you need one of these to get in." I looked down at the tickets and saw one word that helped me make sense out of everything: Travis.

If you don't know, Travis is a scottish band that Jeff and I really love and we had talked about someday going to see them perform live if we were ever in the right place at the right time. I couldn't help but laugh at how great of a surprise Jeff had planned and how perfectly it was executed.
So last night we got to see them, live! We couldn't have been standing more than 25 feet away. It was so cool! Especially because I'd never been to a rock concert before. I don't even listen to a lot of rock music because I have a hard time getting into it, but this is one of the only bands that I've ever really cared about (so far) and that I would want to hear live. And they were there, in the building, standing and playing really close to us. Anyway, it was awesome.

So now, why do I like Travis so much? I'm not sure...I guess I feel like I can relate to their song-writing and musicianship more than most other bands I've heard. Most of the time a band will have two or three songs that I kind of like, but Travis songs are consistently noteworthy. Plus, they seem like pretty clean, down-to-earth guys, which makes them really likeable. This is just my personal taste, but if you've never heard them, you should check out thier myspace page: myspace.com/travis. You won't regret it.