Two weeks ago, I had the most nerve racking and stressful concert experience of my life, and I am an avid concert-goer. I am a Music Industry minor and I took an Artist Management Class last semester where I had to interview a full time Artist Manager with a partner. My friend Rachel and I made a whole list of potential artists’ managers we wanted to interview and on the vast list of managers was BØRNS. If you know anything about him, his music is so good and pretty funky. So as a fan, when we got a response from his manager that she was excited about doing an interview for us, we were ecstatic!
Part of our assignment was to send a handwritten thank you note to the managers that we interviewed and when she received our thank you note, she emailed us saying that she added both of us to the guest list for the Washington D.C. show. Needless to say, we freaked out. The few months awaiting the day made the anticipation and excitement grow strong.
Fast forward to the day of the show and Rachel and I drive three hours to D.C. after class to see the show. We finally find parking and go to the box office and give them our information, only to find their puzzled faces when they say that we were not on the list. I literally think that my jaw dropped to the ground when I heard those words come out of her mouth. There was no better word to describe my emotions than flabbergasted, as ridiculous as it may sound. We showed them our emails with her to prove that we were not crazy and they told us that our best bet was to try and get into contact with the manager, which to us seemed impossible.
Luckily, Rachel is literally the best person you could possibly have in a crisis. Immediately after hearing the news, we emailed her. To our surprise, we instantly got an email back. We were golden, or so we thought. The email was an automatic response that stated that she no longer works for the company anymore and gave the email for his new manager. I know for a fact that my jaw dropped this time. We email her and crossed our fingers.
We were losing hope in the Shake Shack line as we frantically reviewed our previous emails with his manager. We were determined to figure something out because we did not drive three hours for nothing.
Then, we found a glimpse of hope in the situation. As we were rereading emails, we noticed her phone number in the signature line of one of the emails and decided to shoot our shot. Honestly, we did not think at this point we could lose anything, so we decided to text her. As we were waiting for our food at Shake Shack, we were excited when we got a text back! She was so sweet and was so willing to help us out. She remembered us and got in contact with the current manager and made sure that we were all set and had a great time!
The feeling of relief when we received our tickets and walked through the doors of The Anthem was unlike anything I had ever felt before. BØRNS put on an absolutely INCREDIBLE show. I had the absolute best time and it was an experience that I will never forget. My favorite part of his show was his cover of “Strawberry Fields Forever” by The Beatles. That is one of my favorite songs of all time, so it was one of the best surprises to hear it live at such a special show.