I did a crazy and spontaneous thing Monday night: I up and took myself to see Coldplay at the Toyota Center for their Mylo Xyloto tour.

Don’t ask me what Mylo Xyloto means (the band has a hard time explaining it, too), but every time I hear the words Mylo Xyloto, I want to make the Mork and Mindy Na-Nu Nan-Nu gesture as if I am offering my salutations to some foreign entity!

Despite the odd name for an album, it is a keeper, and the concert was an amazing musical and visual experience.  If you squint really hard, you can see the graffiti backdrop on stage.

And it reminded me of the graffiti wall we had at Make It University at International Quilt Festival/Houston a couple of years ago…

 

I like to think that lead singer Chris Martin and his band mates heard about the graffiti wall at International Quilt Festival/Houston, and decided that it was so fun and colorful, they needed to follow suit and feature graffiti for their album artwork. (See how trendsetting quilters can be?!)

Here’s a picture of Chris Martin’s piano with graffiti, perhaps the coolest piano I have ever seen. (And if you don’t know who Chris Martin is, he is married to actress Gwyneth Paltrow.)

Coldplay played a very solid set list, and for the encore, they surprised me by dimming the lights to total black, then reappearing just one aisle over from where I was sitting. I couldn’t stop laughing, I didn’t expect they would pop up so close to me!

And they played one of my very favorite songs of theirs, “Warning Sign.”

And, yes, I came home with my very own souvenir, a Mylo Xyloto t-shirt.

Speaking of music, did you know that we put out a quarterly FREE newsletter called Friends@Festival that is downloadable? In each issue, editor Rhianna Griffin patchworks together a sundry of quilt-y content, including interviews with quilt artists, favorite recipes of quilters, free projects and patterns, and yes, even things like music to quilt by. If you click the image below, you can see the edition that included some of my favorite songs to listen to while quilting. (And, hey, if you have a great idea for an article for Friends@Festival, reach out to Rhianna by emailing her at pubs2@quilts.com!)

So tell me, what kinds of things do you listen to when you quilt? Do you listen to tunes, a specific channel on satellite radio, or just the chirping of birds perched outside your studio window?