This year’s Homecoming concert features Alessia Cara and lovelytheband Oct. 5 at Fiserv Forum, unlike previous years when the concert was held at Central Mall.
Cara will headline the Homecoming concert, fresh off her EP “This Summer,” which came out in September. Cara is responsible for hits such as “Stay,” “Scars To Your Beautiful” and “Here.”
Cara’s powerhouse vocal set will once again enjoy the bellowing acoustics of Fiserv Forum, as she played there most recently June 25 with Shawn Mendes.
Relatability remains a mainstay of Cara’s music and lyrics. On the biography of her website, Cara claims to be “a regular person who makes songs. There’s nothing glamorous about (her).” Her voice, however, is anything but ordinary. Cara’s set should bring raw talent and power to the stage.
The 23-year-old will be continuing her The Pains of Growing Tour with a show at University of Illinois’ campus in Urbana-Champaign Oct. 8.
Indie pop trio lovelytheband will also take the stage Oct. 5, bringing its repertoire of high-powered synths and emotion-driven songwriting.
The band, headed up by lead singer Mitchy Collins and flanked by guitarist Jordan Greenwald and drummer Sam Price, came together in 2017. Since then, they’ve made short work of turning dense and complex emotional ballads into electric works of art.
The band’s loveliest hit, “broken,” reached a billion listeners by October 2018 after its single release in April 2017, according to Rolling Stone. Statistically, that means sing-along participation should rock Fiserv for that track alone.
lovelytheband’s upcoming shows will take the group across the Atlantic until the end of November, so stateside superfans might want to jump at the opportunity to see it live here.
Haley Wasserman, a senior in the College of Health Sciences, said that she loved to see more alternative acts in the lineup.
“I love lovelytheband,” Wasserman said. “I’m looking forward to good, fun energy.”
Wasserman also said she was suprised that Homecoming was able to land Alessia Cara, and she is looking forward to seeing the two genres merge. Though a senior, Wasserman said she hopes the university continues to inject more variety into the artists they get, pondering a potential R&B or hip-hop show.
Wasserman also said she is excited to see the way the concert will utilize its new space.
“It’ll be interesting to see if they can make it Homecoming-esque rather than an arena concert,” Wasserman said.
The Central Mall, where the concert was held in years prior, is the emerald quadrangle that flanks most of the university’s academic buildings. With a dreary forecast on the horizon for Oct. 5, Marquette appears to have made the right decision to move the concert indoors.
What decisions would the tech crews for Alessia Cara and lovelytheband have had to make if they were playing beneath the great megadome known as the sky rather than in the snuggly confines of Fiserv Forum? To find out, the Marquette Wire went to one of the only places where musicians with gigging experience can be reliably found: the Guitar Center in Brookfield, Wisconsin.
Guitar Center employee Mason Hawes said two main strategies come to mind when it starts raining during a gig.
“You either grab and run or hope and pray,” Hawes said.
Hawes went on to say that running is not an exaggeration — in that situation, everything either needs to be covered by a tarp or transported back to somewhere dry as quick as possible.
“Make sure you have everything covered,” Hawes said. “And then hope that the wind doesn’t blow right onto your equipment.”
The “hope and pray” option comes with high risk and high reward. Hawes recalled a coworker telling him a story about how his metal band, Band Needed, was playing a song during a brief thunderstorm which lined up to a song containing the lyrics, “as the thunder rolls.”
While the Homecoming concert might be deprived of a moment like that, fellow Guitar Center employee Jason Hagberg said it was probably for the best.
“You can catch a charge and electrocute yourself,” Hagberg said of playing during thunderstorms.
Hagberg himself recalled a Halloween gig where his band had to deal with rain mixed with snow.
“We just made sure everything was covered and under a balcony,” Hagberg said. “Our hands hurt, but we wore layers.”
For Guitar Center’s Brian Fischer, it’s not even a debate.
“You’ve just gotta deal with it,” Fischer said. “It’s just part of the job.”
