I had a great time at a concert in Gainesville, Georgia on June 21. The concert featured Mike Upright, Gold City and Triumphant Quartet.
Mike Upright was first on the program. I hadn’t heard him live before although I had heard his songs on the radio. He’s a tall guy with a big voice! He’s got a real country sound - but not twangy - both in his voice and the instrumentation on his tracks. He sang a total of about 14 songs in the two portions of the program. My favorites were “He Is Risen” - he said it was an old Wendy Bagwell song - and “Love Letter in the Sand” - about the adulterous woman that the crowd wanted to stone and Jesus was writing in the sand as he spoke to them and the woman.
Gold City was next and I was delighted that they did some of the songs from the new album “Moment of Truth” including “I Cast My Bread Upon the Water”, “Turn Your Back” (Aaron McCune did a great job on this but I still prefer the Triumphant version!!), “What Children Believe” (I really liked this one!), and “When Jesus Saves” - a very loud, in-your-face, brassy, non-traditional song. I’ve gotta say here that all of the music at this whole concert was VERY loud - of course, I was sitting right up under the speakers on the 5th row! They also did several of my very favorites - “When I Get Carried Away”, “Teach Me Lord to Wait”, “Midnight Cry”, “In My Robe of White”, and “I’m Not Giving Up.” All of the guys sounded great and I really enjoyed hearing Bruce Taliaferro for the first time and meeting their bus driver, Ed. Josh Simpson did a very nice job on his piano solo, How Majestic Is Your Name.
Then came Triumphant!! I see these guys a lot and many times their program is basically the same as the previous concert, but I never get tired of hearing them! It’s hard to list favorites, but I really enjoy Clayton’s rendition of Welcome to Heaven. WOW!! What a great song and a great singer! He gives it everything he’s got every time he sings it. They also did “The Cloud He’s Coming Back On” from the new Intermission album, and I like the TQ version better than the Kingsmen version! Great song! David and Jeff had the crowd on their feet with “Goodbye, World, Goodbye.” They are fabulous together on the harmonica and keyboard. Speaking of Jeff, he did two solo selections and was really fantastic. At the last couple of concerts where David has sung ‘For God So Loved,” they have followed that with “He Loves Me” and I just think that combination is SOOO effective. Eric asked the audience to join them on He Loves Me and I heard quite a number of people singing along.
This was a great concert but it was very long and only the true, die-hard fans stayed until the end. I think you can guess what kind of fan I am!