#14. Love at First Sight (Friday, December 15, 2023)

#14. Love at First Sight (Friday, December 15, 2023)

What was your best day…of love at first sight?

The Song

Every person in the world, by definition, has a favorite song. But not everybody has a favorite song.

That was me until March of 2021. Yeah, I had my Spotify playlist of over two hundred generic Top 40 tunes, and while there had been some close calls in the past – most notably Madonna’s “Miles Away”1 during my university years – I can’t say a single song has ever captured my obsession like this one did.

Well, that night in 2021 while I’m deep in my LIBOR & Taxes Magic grinding (#84, #70), YouTube autoplay in the background ends up on “Love at First Sight” by Kylie Minogue. And it’s…pardon the pun, love at first listen. I pause my Magic right away and watch closely from start to finish. The video is epic2, a special mix of carefree yet intentional that seems perfectly emblematic of the type of person I am (and only would’ve been possible in the early 2000s).

Every aspect of the song is pristine, but the greatest part, a very small part, is at the end of this verse that gets called twice:

Thought that I was going crazy
Just having one of those days, yeah
Didn’t know what to do
Then there was you

Kylie Minogue, “Love at First Sight” (2002)

Whereas any other song would’ve gone with the way-too-automatic “then I met you”, Kylie instead subtly subverts everyone’s expectations with a phrase that’s much more passive and understated, giving out a refreshing injection of realism on what “love at first sight” truly is3. Leading to a verse, and overall song, that’s just so much more unforgettable.

Now, with 2021 being the peak of COVID, I’m at home all day and thus have full freedom to have “Love at First Sight” playing in the background on continuous loop. And for several months following, that’s exactly what I do4. While for most songs I inevitably get sick of it after a few days5, that never happens with this one.

(Also, I desperately want to play the song on piano, but there’s no sheet music available. So, during the Christmas break, I spend several days transcribing it myself by hand.)

The Tickets

Confession time. Prior to that fortuitous encounter, I only knew one song by Kylie Minogue. Yes, the one everybody knows (or at least has heard). And while that one did evoke a few memories6, Kylie herself had not been a distinct entity in my mind.

Obvious, that quickly changes. I learn about the rest of her extensive discography, then realize I missed the shot of ever seeing her in concert: she’d only ever done two tours in North America several years ago (in 2009 and 2011), and is now over 50 and hadn’t come out with new music in a while. Seems like I’ll never get to see “Love at First Sight” performed live. A shame.

But then, in early 2023, Kylie comes out with a new album, Tension, with one particular song “Padam, Padam” that gets to top ten in the charts. The comeback is on. This is followed by a July announcement that she’ll be doing a Vegas residency at The Venetian starting November. Holy shit.

But it’s not that straightforward. She’ll be performing in a brand-new, much smaller value, Voltaire, with capacity for only about a thousand. And with these being her first live performances stateside in over a decade, the demand is insane. For both waves of ticket sales, in August and September, I’m at the over two-thousandth space in the queue and miss out completely. So, secondary market it is. But StubHub is listing a single ticket for almost a thousand bucks: no way I can justify that for a two-hour concert on the other side of the continent.

But the prices steadily go down; then, two weeks before this date, I see a ticket on sale for December 15th for only three hundred dollars. As I hesitate, I think back to the insane work year I just had. It was my first year as a (temporary) principal analyst in foreign reserves (#78), which involved some sixty-hour weeks and notable highlights (#23) and ended with me getting a permanent principal position in debt management (#109) in November. A highly successful 2023, but I had taken zero days off. I needed and deserved a vacation in the worst way.

So, it was settled. A six-day trip to Vegas. Days 2 to 6 were pretty good (#48). But Day 1, the Friday of the Kylie Minogue concert, would be something else.

The Show

I start lining up at The Venetian nearly two hours before the nine p.m. show. There’s already a good crowd of Kylie fans there, about ninety percent guys, some of whom have gone all-out with the costuming. As I bond with each of them about our common Kylie fandom, the excitement builds with each passing minute. The consensus is that this will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience: since big-name artists like her rarely, if ever, perform to general ticket-paying audiences in small, intimate venues like this.

Finally, we are let in. Voltaire is a brand-new, cozy, and spectacular venue. The expensive tables are on the lower level, with the general admission section slightly raised behind a railing, and the whole room has a deep mysterious ambiance: dark-blue light, with glass bubble sculptures hanging from the ceiling and these giant crystals surrounding the stage and along the side. I stake out a prime spot right behind the railing with a perfect view of the stage.

The Belle de Nuit pre-show begins. It’s a series of acrobats, dance routines, and similar performances much in the vein of Cirque de Soleil. It’s all high-quality enough, and I enjoy it for what is, while the tension builds in me for the main attraction coming soon.

And as eleven p.m. strikes, the stage opens up again and there is Kylie Minogue. In person. My mind is thrown completely into the moment, with the high-energy performance and memorable music that I must have listened to for hundreds of hours to this point; and the details from the next two hours mostly escape my memory.

I don’t even recall which song Kylie starts with, but I know she gets to all the good ones: “Get Out of My Way”, “On a Night Like This”, and “Spinning Around” (where she dances across several tables), along with her most recent hit and her classic hit of course. All the while, me and the thousand others in the venue are dancing along and singing at the top of our lungs.

But, as the show draws to a close, there’s still one song she hasn’t gotten to yet. Her greatest song.

And finally, as Kylie thanks the crowd and says her farewell, a familiar tune starts rising. A tune that’s become deeply-ingrained in me after almost three years and countless repetitions. And with Kylie starting her motions on stage exactly like she did in that music video from two decades earlier, and the lyrics coming out fresher than I had ever heard them, I know exactly what I’m experiencing now.

The perfect finale. “Love at First Sight”.

  1. The origin for this one is fun. Stuck in a rut in early 2010 for the book I started a few months earlier (#124), I make another trip to the Chapters bookstore. Where “Miles Away” plays a few times on loop. It’s got a bit of an unconventional tune, so at first I find it really annoying but by the end I love it in a weird way. That night, I create a playlist (in YouTube) to listen to while writing, and I put “Miles Away” right at the top. (And I didn’t do shuffle, so hearing that song becomes a trigger in my mind that it’s writing time!)
  2. Kylie is at her peak here, and the whole thing has this futuristic aesthetic (which just stops short of being tacky) and a unique POV where Kylie is facing straight at the camera the entire time. The strange blue shading between her eyebrows and eyes and the metallic “K” necklace are the perfect finishing touch.
  3. Not that I would have any first-hand experience on that…
  4. At full volume too, without earphones. I’m pretty sure my neighbors thought I was losing my mind.
  5. As I did with two other amazing songs I came across later that year: “Breathless” by the Corrs, and “Stars are Blind” by Paris Hilton (thanks to that top-tier scene from top-ten movie Promising Young Woman).
  6. Namely, those middle school dances circa 2002-2004 when I first started getting into girls (#19), and fell into some quite emotional teenage crushes (#51).