Review: AJR remembers Dad during emotional, triumphant production in Tampa [PHOTOS]

Only a half-hour into their headlining set at Tampa’s Amalie Arena last night, the Met brothers addressed the elephant that has been in every room with them for almost a year now.

“We weren’t sure where to put this song in the set, or if we should play it at all,” frontman Jack Met explained, strumming an acoustic guitar that would back him up on “God Is Really Real.” The track, met with a sea of internal breakdowns and respectful, deafening silence from even the loudest of screechers, is centered around the brothers coming to grips with the impending death of their father, Gary Metzger, who was described as their biggest fan. He died last July following a battle with cancer, only hours after the song’s lyric video was first released.

If you fast-forward to the tail end of the close-to-sold-out, 109-minute affair, Jack went more into depth about the kind of person his father was. Gary scoffed at Internet trolls and the boys’ high school’s “Anti-AJR” club. He shamelessly wore his sons’ merchandise to parent-teacher conferences. He even discovered that there was something wrong with his health when he was chasing after a bicyclist in Paris who had unknowingly dropped her phone.

“On his last day alive, we were in the hospital, we were joking around, saying goodbye, we asked him what his biggest piece of life advice was,” Jack recalled, holding back tears. The advice? To go off and be the biggest version of yourself.

And it may have been that thought that caused silent bassist Adam, frontman Jack, and pianist Ryan Met to announce that the “Maybe Man Tour”—promoting their latest album of the same name—would be their first one to take place in major arenas only.

Finally having a full hockey arena to headline in opens up a whole new world to AJR, and not just in terms of attendance levels. Most of the pyrotechnics in place may have only been the contents of dreams in years past, and though a three-piece backing band would normally make you think otherwise about an extravagant first arena tour, the masterful violin work of Ginny Luke, powerful solos from the “queen of the trumpet” Arnetta Johnson, and beats from Iggy Pop-alum Chris Berry were all that the guys needed.

Following an electrifying opening set from scruffy-haired, Aussie singer-songwriter Dean Lewis (“Be Alright,” “How Do I Say Goodbye”), seven body doubles of Jack appeared onstage—with one dangling in the air—for the first bit of the tour’s title track. Once the “1, 2, pandemonium” line was blurted out, the real Met brothers maniacally burst out from underneath the stage, and soon led themselves into “Sober Up,” which saw Ryan sing Rivers Cuomo’s original duet parts.

Following the acoustic-and-Jack-only “God Is Really Real,” “The Good Part” brought the mood right back up to where you want it to be at a Gen-Z gig. On “Bang!,” shadow puppets appeared behind the boys, and Jack ended up doing a drum section mid-song, which would turn into a duet with his silhouette, which would crack out a trumpet and cowbell. But when both drummed like normal, they were in perfect unison and everything looked completely legitimate.

“Touchy Feely Fool” had a spaceship theme, and featured the stunt people in spacesuits shaking and jittering onstage as if they were mid-launch. To follow, videos of Jack falling from a heavily animated sky played during “Karma,” and Ryan would take the stage for himself to play all three parts of “Turning Out” on a matte black piano.

And other times, the showoffery came in the form of a history lesson. While Jack was expressing his amazement at how the band’s crowds only grow as time goes on, Adam looked back on previous gigs in Tampa, and specifically shouted out Yuengling Center and MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre, both of which have seen the band headline gigs as far back as 2019. There was no mention of their holiday-themed concert at St. Pete’s Jannus Live in 2017, but hey: If Adam knows the difference between Tampa and St. Pete already, major kudos to him.

An inside joke between the band and its fans is how Jack (jokingly) dislikes the overwhelming amount of love that Ryan gets during every show, so if not for the former and the rest of the band making their way up to section 301 to sit with the crowd on “World’s Smallest Violin” and The Maybe Man track “Steve’s Going to London,” Jack may have gone a little insane during Ryan’s "Turning Out" bit.

A Tampa-only inside joke that seemingly no one outside a specific online community knew about was the amount of bananas in the crowd. During the segment in which the boys point out people in the audience that have caught their eye, they counted three fans rocking banana suits, and two fans in the pit would go on to ask their heroes very nicely if they could autograph an individual banana on the verge of going rotten.

“That feels too coincidental. That feels like there’s going to be a slow trail of bananas just leading me out there to like, my childhood bully or something like that,” Jack declared, waiting for a Sharpie to sign the rotting fruit. “This is not gonna be a normal show for me for the rest of the time, because this is all I’m gonna be thinking about.”

In the last few years, “Way Less Sad,” which samples Simon and Garfunkel’s “My Little Town,” has had a special place in AJR’s setlists. Its spot on the band’s most recent tour—supporting OK Orchestra—gave it the status of probably one of the greatest post-COVID concert finales. For the current run, the song serves as the one to be deconstructed and recreated in real-time, with stories about a melody coming from Ryan’s tone of voice when telling Jack to put his phone away in a library.

There’s a line in “God Is Really Real” that goes “This kind of thing happens to other dads/It don’t happen to mine,” in which Jack expresses his denial of his father’s illness. And perhaps for that reason, there was a pretty good amount of non-supervisory parents in the close-to-sold-out crowd on Thursday night. Though AJR clearly spent extensive amounts of time with their late father (who seemed to sit in the front row for as many gigs from his sons as possible), perhaps his passing being a central theme of The Maybe Man era is helping some fans realize that our parents won’t be around forever and that they should get as much quality time with their kids in as possible.

After all, life’s fucking long until it stops.