David Garza/Fiona Apple

David Garza was the opening act; he seemed pretty cool--acoustic guitar with a little bit of edge, not too self-indulgent or over the top. But as always, opening acts I've never heard of get short shrift in terms of attention.

Fiona Apple was . . . interesting. She's a good performance answer to Feist's looniness: she knocks up the intensity just a bit (so there's actually a difference between live and studio performance), but not so much that she ruins her sound and leaves everyone in the audience bewildered and alienated. She played surprising amounts of her early stuff, and not as much as expected from Fiona Apple - Extraordinary Machine (stupid tag format). I don't know enough about this to know what it means, but Elizando was playing base--given that he's Dre's right-hand man (and therefore a big shot?) and was brought in to re-produce the album . . . dunno how to integrate all that, but it seems noteworthy.

Somebody had the brilliance to put her in a long, heavy, beautifully-draping black dress with sort of cape-ish sleeves and a coral belt. This had the effect of making her weirdly spastic dancing (?) remarkably beautiful. Also, her set designer or lighting director or whatever is smart. The lighting was atmospheric and color-smart, and there was very little of that execrably stupid rock-show "flash-the-lights-in-time-with-the-music" crap.

Crowd notes: Good-looking women like Fiona. And there was a high fangirl presence, good-looking or not.