Speaking of "Spinning" - do we think there's ANY chance that it, or any of the Whirlwind bonus disc originals, will EVER get played live? I think it would fit well on the TAU tour, but if they don't play it by then, I doubt we will ever see "Spinning" played live.
I had the thought of a 2.5-3 hour show starting with something that WASN'T The Absolute Universe. Open with an epic, either "Into The Blue" or "Duel With The Devil", and THEN launch into the first half of TAU, that way the setlist/CD break would be in the middle of the album and fill the first set/CD with 80 minutes of music (25-30 for the first epic, then about 50 minutes for the first half of TAU). After a short intermission, come back and open with "The Sun Comes Up Today", play the remaining 50 minutes of TAU, then do about 30 minutes of other songs, maybe from The Whirlwind! Then encore with another half hour of music. It would be about 290-300 minutes of a show, which is longer than the average Kaleidoscope Tour show (which was about 160-170 minutes or so, at least looking at the Cologne set).
I think one thing is for sure, they probably won't do any sort of changes to TAU night-to-night. They already have the BD's visualizer to use as video element for the live show, so they will probably stick as close to the Ultimate Mix as possible to sync up to the video. The most I can see them doing is they swap the lyrics around during songs like "Swing High, Swing Low"/"Take Now My Soul", or do the alternate lyrics during "Higher Than The Morning" or "Love Made A Way". Musically speaking, it'll probably be the Ultimate version all the way.
I definitely think they will place an intermission between "The World We Used To Know" and "The Sun Comes Up Today", given how the band wrote the first half as a solid chunk of music, they'll probably want to perform it as such, and there isn't really any other breaking period during the album other than there, so if the first set is going to be longer than 50 minutes, they'll likely open with another song before going into the TAU Overture.
-Marc.