Chance the Rapper’s
Twitter video of him helping his 2-year-old daughter learn to count went viral just a few days before his performance at Phoenix’s Lost Lake Festival on Friday. The video might evoke a sense of nostalgia or familiarity for most parents, if he weren’t using his three recently awarded Grammy’s for the counting lessons.
In his first performance as a Grammy-award winning artist, Chance was his signature self: big and bold, but also humble and sending praises up for all the blessings coming down.
Of course, Chance wasn’t alone onstage, but he also wasn’t playing with just any old band––he was joined Nico Segal and the other members of Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment. When Chance asked the audience if they knew which song was the only one off their debut album,
Surf, to have a music video, the crowd screamed “Sunday Candy” in excitement.
The song’s smooth, impossible-not-to-sing chorus and fun verses (there’s a line about Chance putting 50 rolls on his plate at Christmas dinner) came early in the set, despite it being such a show-stopping number.
Between other songs, Chance mentioned that he was leaving for a vacation soon, and that this would be his last performance of 2017. He thanked the audience, thanked his loved ones, thanked God. Then, he closed out his set with “Same Drugs,” a song about growing apart from the people in your life with heavy allusions to the movie
Hook, and is way more touching and way less weird than it sounds on paper.
As he was the last performer of the night, the audience held out hope for an encore, and didn’t stop applauding until Chance came back onstage to do “Blessings,” a powerful, gospel-y, track from 2016’s
Coloring Book, which just won a Grammy for best rap album.
Rap fan or not, religious or not, maybe even a Chance the Rapper fan or not, between the rapper's nonstop smiles, a spectacular light show, and two separate confetti/streamer shoot-offs, the whole production was hard not to enjoy, and had most people counting their blessings.