As I peruse this board, I notice that many are like me and love albums like 'These Days.' We wonder why they don't play songs from this album and other rare songs live. We moan about set lists and wonder why they don't play Song X and wonder where the "magic" (so to speak) has gone this past decade (I would argue, however, that 'The Circle' is the best album since 'These Days' but that's not really the point of this post).

I think it can all be summed up with this quote from the "When We Were Beautiful" documentary.

"I want to play the desert and sell it out ... more than once."

We want the band to be artists and make music that moves us and them. It seems, on many levels, that they want to play the proverbial desert and sell it out a bunch of times. This is the disconnect.

(Side note: For the time being, we will put aside thier "artistic" "This Left Feels Right" abomination. Pretending that never really happened).

How awesome would it be for them to do a theater tour and announce that it would be a tour featuring rarely played songs and fan-favorites and that, for this tour, they wouldn't HAVE to play "Bad Medicine" and "It's My Life" and "Prayer," etc. but instead they would play "My Guitar Lies Bleeding In My Arms" and "Thorn In My Side," etc? (i.e. like Clapton did on his "From the Cradle" tour where he announced beforehand that it was a blues tour and that you wouldn't hear "Layla," etc.

This won't happen unless the band stops obsessing about having the biggest tour in a year or being on Billboard's top-whatever list for the year and starts obsessing about writing music that moves them (and us) again. Their "honest" music doesn't sell because the general public wants good-time party music and will turn out in droves to hear it live but will sit on their hands during "Love's The Only Rule" (and tell the die-hard sitting in the upper-deck seat to sit down because he is blocking thier view during a song they obviously don't know or care about - but I digress .

I guess, ultimately, that this is the price we pay for being big fans of a band that has had as much success as this one has.

Thoughts?