Gone, but certainly not forgotten:
Stigmata Diaboli, Our Diabolikal Rapture, Salt In Our Wounds, Lose You Tonight, Close To The Flame, Please Don't Let It Go, Beyond Redemption, Sweet Pandemonium, And Love Said No, Vampire Heart, Under The Rose, Behind The Crimson Door, Play Dead, Dead Lovers' Lane, Love, The Hardest Way, and I Will Be The End Of You.
Everyone please have a moment of silence for each of those wonderful songs that each have a minimum of twenty live performances (according to setlist.fm and excluding any covers like Solitary Man). They live on forever in our hearts.
That's not to mention songs with under twenty performances (once again, according to setlist.fm and excluding many other covers) like: The Heartless, The Beginning Of The End, The Path, One Last Time, Beautiful, You Are The One, Endless Dark, Again, Circle Of Fear, and In Love And Lonely.
The point is...well, you know what the point is. All of Buried Alive By Love, Wicked Game, Join Me In Death, Right Here In My Arms, Your Sweet 666, Rip Out The Wings Of A Butterfly, and The Kiss Of Dawn leaves room for many of those songs listed above on any given night, as well as many others that they haven't played in a while and songs to be played for the very first time. Strike the balance between what your newer fans want to hear (and certainly deserve to) and what your veterans would enjoy (because we can't forget about them, or can we?
), as well as just breaking up the monotony of essentially the same exact songs show after show, tour after tour, year after year, and everyone should go home happy, or at least not feeling like they just wasted their time and their money on seeing the same performance yet again. When most bands change up their setlist on a nightly basis, both in terms of the songs they play and the order they play them in for the reasons I just stated (or at least
drastically change up the setlist from tour to tour so you get a brand new experience each time) and with plenty of songs to choose from, there's just no excuse why this particular band, the one we all love, doesn't do it. Change is good. It keeps things exciting.
It all boils down to feeling like the band is on autopilot. All of the months of downtime over the past several years, leaving fans just waiting around for some sort of news to pop up or for the band to suddenly be active again certainly takes its toll. Then when something finally does happen it all just seems so stagnant still. It shouldn't be that way.
