You know that feeling? When you’re dancing on the ceiling and it feels like you’ve been going all night long? It hits you like a brick house, but then it’s also easy like sunday morning. Thanks to Lionel Richie’s appearance at South By Southwest, I now know that feeling exactly. And it feels great.
I’m sorry to hit you with so many terrible Lionel Richie references shoehorned into that first paragraph, but I felt it had to be done. After all, what better way to describe a Lionel Richie show than with the man’s words themselves? All kidding aside though, this was a great show. And we weren’t necessarily sure that it would be great. That’s right, I say “we”, because the entire Panic Manual team felt it was important to check out this set. In fact, as the time approached to make our decision on what to do for the night, we were getting downright excited.
Sure, we may front like we’re all cool, cutting edge and indie, but really, we appreciate a good pop song like anyone else and Lionel Richie certainly wrote a lot of hits. You don’t stick around for decades in the music industry if you don’t have what it takes. And Lionel Richie, ladies and gentlemen, has what it takes. Dude definitely brought his A game. He also brought Kenny Rogers out to sing a duet with him. And as the crowd called out for more Kenny (which briefly reminded me of that Seinfeld episode where Kramer gets hooked on Kenny Rogers’ Roasters), The Gambler himself decided that it was Lionel’s show and knew when to run. But not before Lionel sang a couple bars of Rogers’ own hit, “The Gambler.”
Ultimately, this show was no gamble: as we suspected from the beginning, it was a sure thing and well worth our while. And if you weren’t there? Just imagine that it was exactly like the video for “All Night Long.”