SXSW 2008 is over! It was fun and I'm surprised it's taken me this long to join in the festivities. Last year I went to one free show and saw Northern State which was a blast. This year I expanded my involvement and took two half days Thursday and Friday to catch some free day shows. Highlights were seeing Fastball, Wheatus, Presidents of the United States of America, and Lykke Li (3 times!!)

If you haven't figured it out by now, I'm a huge fan. You might have seen my Twitter about making an ass of myself in front of Lykke Li. Here's the full story - it's Thursday about 1pm and I'm waiting for Lykke's first show to start. I'm drinking a free beer, and I'm about a quarter done with it and starting to feel pretty intoxicated. (I know, my tolerance is ridiculous). I figure I better get some food and get in line to buy a taco. It's taking forever, but some other band is playing which keeps me entertained. I turn around to see what they look like, and BAM! Lykke Li is standing two people behind me along with her band. I get that "holy shit!" feeling in my chest and turn back around before she sees how far my jaw has dropped.

I order my taco and debate whether or not I should approach her for a picture. See I'm generally a shy kind of guy, and not exactly smooth under pressure. (I do OK in emergencies though since I did put out a fire on Tom once.) I figure why the hell not, and approach her and ask if I can get a picture with her. She's hesitantly says ok, so I hand my camera to the only other asian person there (natural photographer), and get this beauty that I posted earlier:

We share a few words, and she says she's shocked that anyone recognized her in Texas. I tell her I think her music is great, and ask how to pronounce her name. She says it's "LEE-ka LEE," spoken really fast. Then I do something stupid, and ask her if she's going to play the spoons. See she has this one video where the entire thing is shot in a bathroom, and she taps spoons on the sink and in the water as part of the instrumentals. It's pretty cool, but a moronic question to ask of a live performance. There's a moment of silence, which I imagine is her translating English into Swedish in her head, realizing what I said was not funny, and then figuring out how to respond nicely. "Um...no," she says. I can't remember exactly how that conversation ended, but it could've been right there. The only thing worse I could've said was "Oh, so you're from Sweden. I love IKEA!"

Want to see something funny? See how happy she is to be next to me in the above photo? Compare that to this picture taken at the third show I went to where I'm standing about 30 feet away. Hmm, I'm going to have to talk to her about this. It's doesn't bode well for our relationship if she's happier the farther away I am.

Her best performance of the three I saw was the third one at Club de Ville, but I was standing with my right ear against a speaker so the audio is uber crap. Her song "Let It Fall" is a great one live. You get to see her drummer totally spaz out, plus at about 1:20 you see how much she loves me when she walks over and acknowledges me, or maybe just the entire side of the stage I was standing on. Either way, I'll take it.

Here's the complete set of videos I have of Lykke Li at SXSW 2008. You can check out her songs on her myspace page, but it's unfortunate the audio in the vids I put up on youtube is so bad because there's this raw passion in her live shows that just puts her over the top.

There's also some extra pics on my flickr.

Man I really don't want to go back to work Monday.