As I left my house around 8:45 P.M. to go see Yo La Tengo at The Waiting Room, I felt cool, calm, and collected. I was listening to The Feelies’ The Good Earth in my car, because listening to the band you’re about to go see is cliché, right? It’s when I drove past the Walgreens on Dodge Street that I realized the show was billed as “An Evening with Yo La Tengo”, and not just as “Yo La Tengo”. This made me worried about my time of arrival being past 9 P.M. (when the show was scheduled to start), because when Yo La Tengo bill the show under that moniker, it means they do the first set “acoustic”, take a break, and then do the second set electric. But most importantly, it means there is no opening act.

I made my way to the front of the crowd (which isn’t that hard being my size) and prepared myself to stand for the next two or so hours. I also brought my camera with me, which I haven’t brought to a concert since 2011. After about five minutes of waiting, the trio consisting of James McNew and husband and wife Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley made their way to the stage.

They started off their first “acoustic” set with “Ohm”, the opening track from their latest album, Fade.

Now I put the word acoustic in parenthesis because although the first set is mostly centered around acoustic guitars played by McNew and Kaplan and drums being played with brushes by Hubley, there were more than a couple moments where McNew used his Fender Jazz bass or Kaplan busted out his old Fender Telecaster. I’d say that “soft” is the more appropriate word to use when describing the first set.

Halfway through the first set, the band brought out a stagehand, named Kyle to play the egg shaker on fan requested via-email “Center of Gravity”.

While the first set was a beautiful smattering of some of the softer songs from their almost 30-year-old career, most of the set was drowned out by incessant chatter from the bar. So much so, that even Kaplan acknowledged the noise towards the penultimate song of the first set.

“We have a couple of songs left before the second set. Then we can drown out all the people in the back.”

The crowd cheered furiously after that, and they finished the first set with the one two punch of “I’ll Be Around” followed by “Nowhere Near”.  The latter containing a controlled guitar freak-out solo by Kaplan.

During the break between the two sets, I took time to set my camera to all the right settings so I would waste no time during the second set. I decided to refrain from taking pictures during the first set because of the soft nature behind it. If you could hear yourself snap your finger, then you would most certainly be able to hear the shutter of a camera.

When the band finally came back on, Kaplan had acquired a small glass of what I assume was whiskey. When he took a sip out of it later on during the second the set, Hubley saw and began to laugh.

The second set began with “Stupid Things”, a standalone single released before Fade.

They wasted no time getting loud and heavy, playing hits like “Stockholm Syndrome” and “Tom Courtenay”.

Considering my ears weren’t ringing for the first set, the band had no problem making sure they did during the second.

The second set came to its epic conclusion with the band playing what must have been a 20-minute long version of “The Story of Yo La Tengo”. After finishing the song of monolithic proportions, the band did the obligatory encore routine and came back on to play some more songs, including a cover of Gene Clark’s “Tried So Hard”, once again featuring Kyle on the egg shaker. The final song of the night was “Detouring America with Horns” from their 1992 album May I Sing with Me.

After wanting to see Yo La Tengo for so long and finally being able to, they did not disappoint. And for McNew, Kaplan, and Hubley all being 40-plus years old, I have to give them credit for being able to rock as hard as they did.