Twenty One Pilots Open a Hometown Stadium Night With “Goner”

Twenty One Pilots came home to the biggest room they could find. On Saturday, October 17, the Columbus band played a sold-out Ohio Stadium — a hometown show on their own turf — and opened it with a choice that set the tone for the entire night.

Instead of a bombastic hit, they started with “Goner,” the fraught, slow-building closer from their 2015 album Blurryface. According to the fan-maintained setlist archive setlist.fm, it was the first time the band had ever used the song to open a show, and it was preceded by a taped “Hometown” intro that leaned into the geography of the moment.

Why the opener landed

“Goner” is a strange song to walk out to, which is exactly why it worked. It is a track about isolation and holding on, built to end a set on a cathartic note; flipping it to the front of the show told the crowd this would not be a greatest-hits victory lap so much as an emotional one. The clips that circulated afterward were full of tears as often as cheers.

It helped that the band chose their hometown for the experiment. Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun formed Twenty One Pilots in Columbus, and playing the Ohio State University stadium carried an obvious symbolism — the local act that grew up in the city’s basements and bars, now filling its football stadium.

A marathon set

The night was not short. Per setlist.fm, the show ran to 38 songs across more than three hours, which fans logged as the longest performance of the band’s career to date. That length let the duo move between the arena-sized singles that made their name and the deeper cuts that reward the people who have followed them since the Blurryface era.

WOUB Public Media, covering the concert locally, described it simply as a sold-out hometown show at one of Columbus’ largest venues — a milestone framed less as a conquest than as a homecoming. The band itself let the setlist do the talking, with no grand speeches surfacing in the coverage.

Stadium shows tend to blur together into the same confetti-and-fireworks template. What made this one stick was the restraint of the first few minutes — a band that could have opened with anything choosing to open with a song about barely hanging on, in the city where it all started.