Encore Royalty: We Scored Every Last Straw Curtain Call in Band History, and the Internet Helped
Here's a confession from the Last Straw camp: we don't actually remember most of our encores. When you're running on adrenaline, lukewarm coffee, and four hours of sleep, the final fifteen minutes of a show blur into a single emotion. So we did what any self-respecting band with a laptop would do — we crowdsourced the whole thing.
We pulled from fan-shot phone videos, ancient forum threads, a shoebox of ticket stubs, and roughly 200 DMs from people who were there. Then we scored every encore in band history on three criteria: chaos, surprise guests, and singalong volume. The results are contested, chaotic, and — per at least one Reddit user — "criminally wrong." Fair.
The Scoring System (Brace Yourselves)
Each encore earned up to 10 points per category. Chaos covers anything unplanned: blown amps, stage invasions, wardrobe failures, the Philadelphia balloon incident (more on that later). Surprise guests is self-explanatory, but bonus points if the guest wasn't even a musician. Singalong volume is measured by the only metric that matters: whether the video audio clips the mics.
The Podium
Bronze — The Balloon Drop, Philadelphia, 2019. Someone in the venue's production crew released 500 balloons during the final chorus without telling anyone, including us. Frontman reaction: visible confusion. Crowd reaction: pure bedlam. Score: 27/30.
Silver — The Acoustic Pivot, Austin, 2022. Our amp rig died mid-encore, so we unplugged entirely and played the closer standing on the monitors, no mics, a crowd of 4,000 carrying every note. A fan recording from the balcony sounds like a church choir that's had too much sweet tea. Score: 28/30.
Gold — The Wedding Gig, Chicago, 2018. We brought a couple on stage who'd gotten engaged during the set, played their song, and then the venue's actual DJ — a stranger — hopped up and took over percussion. Nobody has ever explained how he got up there. Nobody has ever tried. Score: a perfect 30/30, and yes, we're still mad we didn't think of it first.
Honorable Mentions
The Portland show where a dog ran on stage (8 chaos points, zero guest points, and a lifetime ban we successfully lobbied to overturn). The Denver night the crowd out-sang us so thoroughly that the front-of-house engineer said the board "peaked in a way I've never seen." And the infamous Detroit encore that lasted four songs because we simply refused to leave.
The Missing Years — This Is Where You Come In
Our archive has genuine holes. The 2015-2016 van-era shows? Barely documented. Anything before the first proper tour exists mostly in blurry photos and unreliable memory. If you were at any early Last Straw gig and remember what we played — or better, have footage — we want your eyewitness account.
Drop your stories in the comments or send them to our submissions page. Include the date, the venue, and what happened. The more specific, the better. Best submissions get featured in a follow-up piece, and one lucky contributor is getting a signed vinyl and a very apologetic phone call from the band.
Because here's the truth: the encores were never really ours. You wrote them. We just happened to be standing on the stage.
