5 Things I Wish I Knew Before My First Shawn Mendes Concert

I’ve never really been a “concert person”. The thought of being crammed into a stadium with thousands of other people doesn’t really appeal to me.

When my husband used to work for a large company in Toronto in the 90’s he was always being offered free concert tickets and as a result we’ve been able to see big name concerts like Madonna, Depeche Mode and Janet Jackson.

While I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity to have gone, if we didn’t receive free tickets I would not have paid to go (except for Depeche Mode – weren’t the 1980’s a pretty great decade!).

I did have the opportunity more recently to see another popular 80’s band – Tears For Fears – at a Casino where at 45 years old I’m pretty sure I was one of the younger concert goers in the crowd! This was a much more enjoyable experience with only 5,000 people in attendance (my kind of concert venue).

Our oldest daughter Reese has been a huge fan of Shawn Mendes for a few years now (at one point an entire wall in her bedroom was covered in Shawn Mendes posters). For anyone with teen daughters you’ve most likely heard of him but for those who don’t know, Shawn is a Canadian Singer and Songwriter who was discovered singing cover songs of other artists on YouTube.

Reese had been asking for concert tickets to see him for a few years and we finally decided that we would surprise her on Christmas morning with tickets when she was 13. It was the first time that she was speechless and in tears opening up a Christmas gift – #MomAndDadWin!!!

I was so excited for her to go to her first real concert but at the same time I was also dreading the fact that most likely I would be the one taking her and also having to go. I wasn’t comfortable just dropping her off at a concert venue for the first time, leaving and then picking her up after the concert was over at 13 years old.

Overall it was a great experience but there are a few things that I will do differently to prepare for when our youngest asks for tickets to see her first concert.

#1: Purchase tickets as soon as they go on sale! By the time we made the decision to buy concert tickets to Shawn’s Toronto show as a present for Reese it was too late. Most of the seats for mid priced tickets were gone.

I debated at length on whether to suck it up and pay more money than we wanted, pay less and sit in the nose bleed section or to search for another venue that we could drive to and hope that they still had good priced tickets left. For her first real concert experience, I didn’t want to be in the nosebleed section.

In the end we found floor seats in Cleveland, Ohio for less than $200 USD for 3 tickets (a bargain compared to Toronto pricing for the same seats). I purchased an extra ticket so that Reese could bring a friend and she invited her cousin Hunter to come along. My cousin happens to live just outside of Cleveland so she invited us over to spend the night after the concert.

I didn’t know it at the time but these seats would be right beside a smaller stage that Shawn would use to perform on during the concert. I thought that the girls were going to pass out when Shawn popped up on the stage for a surprise set and was only a few feet away from them for a short performance.

#2: Register for a pre-sale code. I didn’t realize until after the fact that there were pre-sale codes that I could have signed up to receive and use to purchase tickets before they went on sale to the general public, increasing our chances of getting good seats. Yes…I always seem to be a bit behind in knowing things like this…something that I’m working on.

#3: Bring ear plugs! All of the concerts that I’ve been to before were loud but I was not prepared for what I was going to hear at this concert with 20,000 screaming teenage girls (and I’m pretty sure that I heard some of the mothers in the crowd screaming more loudly than their daughters)!

I have no idea how Shawn is able to concentrate, play and sing with constant screaming from his fans in the audience. For the entire drive back to my cousins after the concert, all night and into the next day, my ears were still ringing.

#4: Arrive extra early! I hate being late so we usually arrive to events way too early just in case. My attempts to arrive early in this case were thwarted when trying to find a parking spot.

In downtown Toronto, I know the area fairly well, so I usually just park on one of the side streets and we would walk to the venue. Because we were in Cleveland for the first time, I didn’t want to get lost at night after the concert trying to find my car so we decided to park in the underground parking at the concert venue to make it easy (or so we thought). It took at least a half an hour to find an open parking spot once we drove into the garage and then we walked to the entrance and the girls realized that they forgot their sign that Reese spent 3 weeks making so we had to walk back to the car to get it.

When we finally got inside the arena we immediately lined up at the merchandise booth to purchase a concert t-shirt thinking that it would be a quick purchase (I’d forgotten how indecisive teen girls can be when buying clothing). 45 minutes later the concert had already started with the opening act, Charlie Puth, playing 2 full songs before we were able to finally make it to our seats.

#5: Listen to the artist’s songs ahead of time! I’m not a stranger to Shawn Mendes’ music. His songs are played on our local radio station often, Reese and her younger sister have his songs on their Spotify playlists and if your girls are like mine, they sing around the house non-stop.

Since we had a 6 hour car ride from our house in Canada across the border into the States to Cleveland Ohio, we had plenty of time to listen to even more of Shawn’s music. I thought I was pretty well versed on most of it but there were still quite a few songs that I hadn’t heard before the concert.

Knowing the songs of the musician/band that you are seeing in concert makes for a more enjoyable experience. It had been a long time since I heard music from Tears for Fears so I brushed up with a playlist I made on Spotify before their concert.

After my Shawn Mendes concert experience, I was better prepared to handle another concert ticket request that came from our 9 year old recently for JoJo Siwa tickets 🙂

Have you been to a concert with your teen before? Who did you see? What was your experience like and would you do it again? Please share in the comments section below.