I am now a proud member of the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Fan Community

And I have a bunch of confirmation emails to prove it.

Presale for their show at the Gramercy Blender Whatever Theater in September is going on now (And will probably be done by the time I get around to posting this.) Can you believe this is their first straight up, regularly priced and scheduled show in New York City since New Years Eve. And does that really count as regular? So...since Summerstage? That's just crazy.

But it makes you think...if you're a band and you're reached a very high point of success early on...where do you go from there? How do you keep going? The members of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah seem like relatively down to earth people. Yeah, they've got some really great songs, but they just rock em out pretty straightforward. Nothing fancy. And that's cool. But what do you do once everyone's seen you play once or twice and doesn't need to see you again?

For a band like Clap, playing clubs like Gramercy rather than trying to push it to bigger and bigger venues, it just shows a certain understanding most artists lose once they break. This is what people want when they see them live. This was, really, their only play (aside from maybe playing McCarren pool for free...or as a co-headliner with someone else awesome.) You see the Clap guys around, in bars and at shows. They KNOW nobody WANTS to see a band at Webster Hall or Roseland, so they avoid it. They know a concert is more fun when you're up front. They know everyone groans when a ticket costs more than $20. Their friends are their fans, and their fans are their friends. They don't seem to want to disappoint any of them.

At this point they're really playing on house money anyway. They've already won. They had nothing left to prove a year ago. And that's not a bad place for a band to be in. They can just go out and do what they want. That was always their thing anyway.

Or maybe they're just not popular enough to play anything bigger anymore. Whatever.

I bought two tickets.

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