An Amusing Little Whine: ThePianoGuys Get Close To Home

It’s 3 a.m. and I’m sitting in front of the computer typing this and listening to ThePianoGuys. We went to see them in concert at the Centennial Concert Hall last night. They were fantastic (as expected)! Such brilliant musicians with some of the best patter you’ll ever hear.

All six of us went. It was my daughter, the family musician, who first turned me on to the ThePianoGuys about 4 years ago. And I’ve been loving their music ever since. So last Fall, when I found out that they were coming to Winnipeg, I immediately knew what my daughter and her husband were getting for Christmas. We gave them two tickets and we gave two to ourselves because, well, we weren’t letting them go without us and that’s all there was to it! So the four of us sat together and my son and his fiancée were also there but they were sitting elsewhere with one of his fiancée’s friends. (I should also add that my son has a rather off-beat sense of humour. I have no idea where he got it, but he has it. That will become important later.)

For those of you who have never heard of ThePianoGuys or seen their videos, I’m including links to some of my favourite videos at the end of this post. In a nutshell, they are two guys, Jon Schmidt, who plays piano, and Steven Sharp Nelson, who plays cello. See?.... Piano guys. It’s obvious, right? There is actually a story and a logical reason why they are named the way they are but I’ll leave that for them to explain in their concerts (personally I think it’s so Steven (the cellist) can milk it for all it’s worth). They’re both very funny but Steven’s humour is just tack sharp and the patter between them is hilarious.

There are also two other “Piano Guys,” Al Van Der Beek and Paul Anderson. They mostly stay behind the scenes but also do come out and perform on selected songs. TPG songs are usually instrumental but they do perform with singers occasionally, most notably Shweta Subram and Alex Boye. But last night they brought out Mr. Van Der Beek to sing. He has a great voice! We need to hear more from him.

They are all real down-home guys. There are no egos, no bravado, no divas. Just people who enjoy making music (and taking pot shots at each other – LOTS of pot shots) who broke through on YouTube a little over 10 years ago. And now they’ve hit it big and no-one deserves success more than them. Their love of music shows through every time they perform.

The concert was fantastic. For their performance of Beethoven’s Five Secrets (watch the YouTube video. It’s astonishing! The link is below), they included the violin section from the Winnipeg Youth Orchestra who looked like they were definitely enjoying themselves. Their performance of “Fight Song” also included local musicians – some young pipers playing bagpipes. And their performance of “The Story of My Life” had all of us in tears. If you feel like having your heartstrings tugged, watch it on YouTube.

But apparently the fact that 50% of ThePianoGuys main performers don’t actually play the piano comes up fairly often and during the show they talked about how it confuses some new viewers on YouTube. And, to make matters worse, some of their videos are solos featuring just Steven on cello. In other words, there are ThePianoGuys videos where there is no piano in the video at all! Steven was explaining that this generates some “interesting” comments on their videos and quoted one such comment, “Thumbs up to the guy who doesn’t know what instrument he’s playing.”

At intermission, we were out in main lobby and caught up with my son who had been sitting on the other side of the concert hall. He just looked at me and said, “Have I got a story for you!”

When he was first asked to go to the concert way back in the Fall, he wasn’t very familiar with them so he googled them and the first video he found was a cello solo with no piano. He left a comment. His comment? “Thumbs up to the guy who doesn’t know what instrument he’s playing.” That’s right. The comment they used on stage….. was my son’s! Way to go, kid. You’re famous!