Sufjan Stevens @ The Wiltern

Somehow in the feeding frenzy of Ticketmaster.com ordering, I managed to score two loge (lower balcony) seats to the Sufjan Stevens show at the Wiltern. That the seats were on the aisle was a bonus. We arrived during the opening act, My Brightest Diamond, which as best I could tell was a subset of Sufjan's band, but led by his talented backing vocalist and musician, Shara Worden. We caught the last two songs, one of which was a heady cover of a Nina Simone song. The aisle seats paid dividends immediately, because we were able to vault to the upstairs bar before anyone else knew the opening act was over.

The crowd was entirely made up of what my girlfriend affectionately calls "nerdbos" (long 'o'). A nerdbo, as best I have been able to decipher, is a term of semi-endearment referring to a position in the spectrum of nerds to geeks thusly: they are cooler than nerds, but not as internet-centric as geeks. Nerdbos are often seen at other venues in our neighborhood, because they border on hipster. Sufjan Stevens, my girlfriend deemed, is also a nerdbo.

The show began with about fifteen musicians coming out wearing masks and butterfly wings. There was a string section of violins and cellos (or were they violas? I wouldn't know how to tell.) The horn section had trumpets and a trombone. Sufjan himself came out also wearing a mask, but bird wings. He introduced the ensemble as "the majestic songbird and his butterfly brigade."

His album, Illinois, was my favorite of 2005, so I was very familiar with all those songs. Less so the ones from Michigan, which I do own but now view as a warm-up act for the former. I know even less from The Sevens Swans, but the songs are all very accessible: intricate arrangements tending to make full use of the horn and string sections, which die out in time for his soft-spoken vocals. At times the music overwhelmed the vocals.

During The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts, they brought out dozens of inflatable Supermen and tossed them into the audience. It was amazing to see these cartoon characters crowd-surfing below us. However, a lot of people soon realized that the Supermen would be make great concert souvenirs, and merely held on to them. These folk immediately lost "nerdbo" status and were demoted to "downers".

I was happy to see Sufjan mess up a couple of times, only because he's such a prolific songwriter and multi-instrumentalist that it was nice to discover he was actually human. The concert overall was very fulfilling, and he had probably been at the top of my list of favorite artists I haven't seen live. The Wiltern, which I usually hate, ended up working well, especially because we had seats – none of his songs are especially danceable, so it was fine. The crowd was uber-enthusiastic, and the standing ovation at the end of his set was one of the longer ones in my recollection. Nobody sat down until he came out and played a few more songs in the encore.