Twenty One Pilots and the Difference Between Playing and Performing

By some magical twist of fate, I landed pit tickets to Radio 104.5’s 9th
Birthday Show last Saturday the 11th...

By some magical twist of fate, I landed pit tickets to Radio 104.5’s 9th Birthday Show last Saturday the 11th (coincidentally my brother’s birthday, but unfortunately he decided to go on vacation instead of letting me take him to a concert). A dozen or so bands played, but the big draw for me was the headliners, twenty one pilots, and “big draw” I mean I purchased the tickets when they were the only band announced. TOP is my wife’s favorite band, and in my humble opinion Blurryface was the best album of 2015. Never mind that nobody asked my opinion.

A second coincidence: I first “discovered” TOP in 2013 as they opened the 6th Radio 104.5 Birthday Show. I say “discovered” because my wife (then girlfriend) already loved them and insisted to me that they were awesome. In return for her suggestion, I snuck up front to watch them play up close while she waited for me in the lawn area, wondering where I had disappeared to. Somehow that woman married me!

Twenty one pilots was great in 2013 when they were juuuust on the cusp of success; their show had a ton of energy and their songs were plain cool, unlike anything I had heard before. Seeing them headline their own show, playing a full set, was an opportunity I could not pass up. And they did not disappoint.

So for this next section I’d like you to think about the last concert you went to. I’ve been to a lot; mostly rock concerts, some small festivals, some in clubs, some in stadiums. I’ve seen some artists several times. I’ve even played in bands and performed live myself. But until seeing twenty one pilots live, I never really thought about what I wanted out of a live show.

I don’t want to name any names because all of the bands at the Birthday Show were awesome, but the difference in their show styles was apparent. While every other band at the show (and arguably every band I’ve ever seen) played their songs, twenty one pilots performed them. Their show approached performance art. It was like a night at the theater. But you know, with a bunch of sweaty people jumping into you.

I won’t dig into a beat by beat playback of the whole show, but basically for an hour and a half, they were performing. After their first song they both disappeared from the stage, only to be replaced by a video screen playing a Lynchian short film of drummer Josh Dun being harassed by people in masks inside his house, all telling him he shouldn’t go back out onstage. He changes clothes and then returns, and the tone of the show shifts from being a simple band playing songs.

There were costume changes. They interpolated bits from their songs and even did different arrangements of several pieces, often moving parts of the song so it would start with the chorus instead of the verse, or skip a verse entirely, or any number of other things.

Man, I am not good at talking about music.

In two different instances, after playing hits “Holding On To You” and “Stressed Out”, the lights cut out and came back up to highlight Tyler Joseph at the piano, where he reprised the two songs as ballads. For their sequence of ukulele-led songs, Joseph came out on stage in sunglasses and a Hawaiian styled-shirt, played the opening of “House of Gold” and then mashed up their song “The Judge” with “Can’t Help Falling in Love”. Right in the middle of the show, they even brought out show openers Chef’special and Mutemath to perform covers of “Twist and Shout”, “My Heart Will Go On”, and even House of Pain’s “Jump Around”.

At one point they had two performers in hazmat gear and gas masks come out to dance on stage. Later, they brought those same performers out to perform a drum line with Dun. They crowd surfed FOUR separate times, once Joseph climbed out by himself, then Dun drummed on a platform held aloft by the crowd, then Joseph ran across the crowd while inside a giant inflatable ball (and he went pretty much the whole way through the pavilion, right up to the lawn), and they wrapped up the show by having BOTH Joseph and Dun drumming on platforms held by the audience, while confetti shot out of a cannon and covered the pit.

It was an incredible show from start to finish, and I’m really having a hard time just processing it. If you’re reading this and thinking “well yea, OBVIOUSLY that’s what makes a show great”, then great! You were two steps ahead of me and we should share notes on who else is doing this. But I guess my roundabout point here is that I don’t think this style of performing is the norm, but man I wish it was.

If you’re a musician and you want to inject some extra energy into your live shows, I highly recommend thinking of ways to turn it into more of a performance. Think about how your genre and personal style allows for you to play around and have fun with your music. Don’t be so precious about playing a song exactly the way you first wrote it; maybe there’s a cool way to purposefully mix things up.

And if all else fails, confetti cannons are ALWAYS a good decision.

-Alex