Thanks for coming to Stuttgart Joeseph,
Was it your first show here ?

The Audience was not very outgoing but for a fan it is always a pleasure to see the pathbreaking performance especially on a warm sommer evening.

Out on a limb
Horses
Almost blue/Your only job
Someone to love
Watch our shadows run
This is still my world
Over the sun
Gypsy faded
Face in the crowd
Midwest
Call
Love never asks you to lie
Eyes on my back
Crying like a man
Tattoo *
Ashes everywhere *
Honey and the moon *
In the sun*

* off mic

Met Marco again. Joseph did a nice painting on a black background

Also here Travel as equals with Call spoken

That's some album promotion set - all 12 songs from TGC played in the opening 12 songs....a bit reminiscent of the approach he took with the first ND shows back in 2006.

he actually mentioned that himself when i saw him after the show, he said playing the whole record gave the show a sense of purpose. he actually played most of the songs back to back, there were at least two transitions when the audience didn't even get to applaud because the new song was already under way. the main set ended with love never asks you to lie, everything after that came after the break, essentially as the encore, and when joe came back he grabbed a graduation ceremony vinyl from the merch table to see if he got the tracklist right (which he didn't entirely, but hey, it still worked).

i think it would have been the ultimate album promotion if he'd told the audience about what he was doing, i guess the greater part of the audience most probably didn't know the record yet (it's not on sale in germany except for itunes, and i suppose most of those who were familiar with joe didn't check out more recent stuff and knew him only from his first few records, i.e. In The Sun (which became a singalong in the end, does he do that often?) and Honey and the Moon, which to my surprise is also one of his trademark songs in germany although it has no airplay, no promotion and no nothing. i don't know if there's one of those US tv show soundtracks that boosts that song over here...

i also thought the main idea was that, as the cd of the graduation ceremony wasn't on sale (and the vinyl, again to my surprise, didn't really sell), people could still get hold of the album by buying the bootleg. again, if they'd told that to the audience... the whole idea of the instant bootleg was presented just when the audience cheered for another reason, so i think most didn't get that, and there were people at the merch stand who had to be told twice and thrice that this was a cd of the show they'd just witnessed (it still is quite unusual for an artist to do that, isn't it?).

all in all, a really, really nice show with a really good mood.

joel: it was his first headlining tour of germany, i think he only did a few festivals plus support for tracy chapman in 2008 and for ben harper in 2000. so even if he had been to stuttgart before, it wouldn't have been such a massive show. it's actually baffling how someone can do such an unique presentation of music, combine it with poetry and art and not be at least hyped up by the higher brow culture press (you know, next to jazz pianists, soul revivalists and the odd "almost as good as dylan" singer/songwriter). maybe someone should tip off Arte, their french branch could finance something so the German branch would get to see it.

Great post Marco! Thanks for posting.

The album seems to have hit a brick wall over in the UK. Amazon have it listed as Out of Stock and thats been the case since at least Monday this week when it was due to be released - however I beleive they did honour any advance orders so technically it has been released here, just difficult to track down (other than as a download).

I think the idea of playing the whole album is a great one - particularly given the fact that it's a new release and that it should make it more interesting for the artist to be playing a bunch of newer songs rather than relying too much on stuff he's played hundreds of times (even allowing for the changes in arragnement/melody that he is prone to do).

In the Sun became a sing a long in Manchester at least by some of the audience - most notably a bunch of drunk blokes who couldn't sing to save there lives -oh well, I suppose they paid for tickets and so could be considered to be 'fans'.

The whole promotion thing does seem to be directly down to powerful record company and management support, or lack of. TV companies are bound to agree to film a piece for use in a music show if their costs are covered by others - a form of revenue just like advertising - and I would think this would only happen if the record company agrees to cover the costs, particularly where the artist isn't particularly well known. Certainly in the UK Joe's last TV exposure came when he was with 14th Floor in 2005/6. Its as if he hasn't done anything for five years so far as the arts programmes, magazines here are concerned. A complete nonsense of course but promotion isn't going to happen in this day and age for altruistic reasons alone.