“Hey, do you think we can move down to the front once the show starts?” I asked the security woman working a section of the Maroon 5 concert last week.

“Probably not sweetie,” she said. “It’s a sold out show.” I rolled my eyes at my friend thinking she was lying, but I was soon proven wrong; I have never seen so many people of all different ages packed into one place at one moment in time. Adam Levine really knows how to bring people together.

Arriving at the concert was hectic. A Wednesday afternoon proved heavy Austin traffic all the way south to the Austin 360 Amphitheater.  I had attended a concert there previously and parking wasn’t a problem then, but this time, I ended up parking half a mile away from the venue off a dirt road and in a grass parking lot. We even ended up paying a bike cart to take us to the gate.

After milling around and buying concert T-shirts (a whopping $35 spent on one shirt), we headed to our seats, where we had a pretty good view about midway to the stage.  The opening act was P.J. Morton, Maroon 5’s keyboardist, who played soulful, churchy melodies to get the crowd moving. But at this point everyone was simply too excited to focus.

Kelly Clarkson followed, and I have never heard such amazing vocals in my life. We all know the Texas-native from the first season of American Idol, and she has many hit singles, but I never realized how many of her songs I truly did know by heart.  Listening to her belting out Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved a Man” gave me goose bumps and her closing single “Since U Been Gone” had me screaming my lungs out and dancing around my seat.

After waiting 30 heart stopping minutes, all of the lights went out.  The screen went black. There, on the very front of the stage, was the man known to earth as Adam Levine.  (I feel bad for the rest of the band because all you could hear was the crowd chanting “Ad-am, Ad-am, Ad-am” the entire time).

Maroon 5 was all I ever hoped for and more.  While they didn’t interact with the crowd as much as Clarkson did, their performance was just as equally show-stopping.  Toward the beginning of their first set, Levine threw out giant, white blow up balls with color changing powers out to the audience as well, making the crowd part of the show.  Their acoustic performance of “She Will Be Loved” and their closing act of “Daylight” brought me to tears and “Moves Like Jagger” had even the dad in the seat in front of me dancing along.

Something that I really enjoyed from the show was the effects. During every song they played something on the big screen, like a neat background or a zoomed in video of the singer with an effect to go with the song on it.  In between the sets, music videos were played, and people could text or tweet a message to the amphitheater.

The show was fantastic, both the performance and the music aspects of it, and I would in a heartbeat pay to see Maroon 5 and even Kelly Clarkson in concert again.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars