Music

I spoke with The Wallflowers’ Jakob Dylan on the phone during some rare downtime for the band in New York City. The Wallflowers will play The Commonwealth Room on Saturday, Aug. 23 2025.

We could have spoken entirely about his dad Bob, and it’d have been perfectly appropriate to do so. Instead, we talked about songs that became radio staples in the late ’90s and never stopped getting played. We agreed that The Clash’s London Calling sounds as fresh now as it ever did. He also shared that it’s best to never, ever stop touring. Lucky for him, he prefers it.     

Q: How’s your tour going?

Dylan: It’s really good. My preference is to tour a lot these days. As long as we find places to play, we stay out. It’s good to be busy.

Q: Is that tied to new music at all?

Dylan: I’m hoping I’m past that. The last record came out in 2021, but I want to get to the point where I don’t have to have a new record, just a body of work that allows us to tour anytime we want.

Q: You’ve been at this for a minute, after all. You have plenty of songs.

Dylan: I do, you know? When this band first got really busy, we had one record to play. And records are usually 12 songs long. If you only have a dozen songs to play, you might not want to play every one.

Q: I read you got into music because of The Clash. Any truth to that?

Dylan: When you’re 12 or 13, you discover bands and they have a different power over you. When you’re older, you don’t need it as much, but it still influences you. In my earlier years, I got jolted by what I heard. The Clash are considered a punk band, but I never thought of them that way. They were the best rock and roll band out there, and I haven’t changed my mind about that.

Q: I played The Clash and London Calling over and over. Joe Strummer’s the greatest.

Dylan: They all were, and it’s their writing that sets them apart. They had the best drummer, Topper Headon, and he could play differently from his peers. Listen to London Calling and it does not sound dated. I still can’t believe it was released in 1979. It sounds like a brand new record!

Q: And you think you’re not as influenced by what you listen to as you get older?

Dylan: You’re just not as pliable. You take on information and are always learning. I still do that. But I don’t listen to music the way I used to. I don’t know if anybody does. Our brains are putty, soaking up information differently. My brain still is putty, actually.

Q: Mine, too. I’m curious: when you have a song like “One Headlight” or “6th Avenue Heartache” and you hear it either on the radio 25-30 years later, what’s the reaction?

Dylan: Hearing them played never gets old. Just like that, I’m a kid again. I grew up listening to the radio, so the first time your song gets played, it’s stunning. And 30 years later, it still feels the same.

When people still listened to the radio, everybody knew the same songs. Even if it wasn’t my favorite band playing, I listened. Everyone did. It was a special time, coming up in the early ’90s. The radio was a monster.

Q: And you came up in the MTV era. I constantly wonder how music gets discovered now, but did your having music videos in heavy rotation help?

Dylan: [Music is] a free fall. Anyone can get lucky, and everybody else follows, trying to figure out how they did it. They try doing the exact same thing. Bands I’ve never heard of are playing arena shows. Thirty years ago, there was no way you didn’t know the bands playing those venues.

There’s room for everybody—and I don’t want to be the old man on the lawn and screaming at younger generations—but it’s changed. When I came up, people ahead of me thought it had changed then, and they didn’t know how to make videos for MTV. It keeps evolving, and we keep trying to adjust. What else can you do?

Q: So it’s harder now to be a career musician?

Dylan: Undoubtedly. The only advice I can give is to learn how to play your instruments well and get off the computer. Stop working alone. Tour. Travel. It’s what you have to do. You won’t make a living staying at home and making records. It’s a touring business, and it works for me.

Q: And what is it you like about being a road warrior?

Dylan: Every day is different. I came up touring, so I like waking up in new places all the time, meeting people. Something great could happen daily. That’s the troubadour experience, and it’s been around forever. In your early 20s, it sounds exciting, but in your 40s, you might grow out of it. I’m just one of those who haven’t.

Q: Have you done it long enough for people to stop asking questions about your pops?

Dylan: I never expected that to go away, but there’s not a lot to talk about when you’re a new artist. If you interviewed me 30 years ago, I was well aware of the elephant in the room then. I thought if I put my head down, it would go away after a certain amount of success. But I live with it, and have no complaints. There’s a lot worse baggage you could have strapped to you. It’s complimentary when people mention him, so it’s nothing to be upset about. We won’t get a better artist [than Bob Dylan].

Q: Have the things you liked about playing and recording changed?

Dylan: When you write songs for a living, there’s more than a few exit strategies. Pay attention and you can stop along the way. Plenty do. Those who still do it years later do so because they can’t stop. It’s like anything else you do for 30+ years, though; you keep it interesting.

Sometimes you’re happy to do it and other times you’d like a break, but it’s what you chose to do. Why would I ever stop doing this? Life is hard. You have to get through it doing something you enjoy doing. I have nothing but gratitude for being here this long. It’s joyful.

Q: Is part of that an attempt to chase another colossal hit, on the radio or otherwise?

Dylan: Name me a rock band that’s had a colossal hit recently.

Q: Good point. Maybe The Killers?

Dylan: And how long ago was that? It’s been a while. Am I craving a big hit? I mean, sure. Who wouldn’t want one?

Q: So maybe rock music isn’t exactly thriving right now, is that it?

Dylan: Rock bands are around, but not the way they were when we grew up. The genre is back where it belongs, on the outskirts, like when it started. It wasn’t always popular, and people seem stunned that it’s back on the fringes.

When I started, a songwriter wrote songs, worked with a band, and tried making a demo tape. They went to a record label. You rehearsed more. You entered the studio and recorded. And, if you were lucky, you landed on the radio. How do bands do it today, though? I wish I knew.

Q: Many want that quicker path to success, no?

Dylan: There’s always an overnight success. We didn’t have that. People considered us a failure at the beginning. But younger people or bands see their peers get so rich, so quickly, just by hitting send on the computer. Telling them about hard work at that point is asking a lot, especially when they see others find success so easily.

Q: And not comparing yourself to others is hard to do.

Dylan: It is. There’s more content to make now, and a lot of space to fill. We don’t all share the same music now. There are younger people who know all the new songs and music and they’re great, but I don’t hear those same songs. Maybe it’s because I don’t sit on a computer all day.

Q: Thanks for taking the time to connect today, Jakob.

Dylan: If you can drag a good line out of our conversation, send it to me. Maybe I can be an overnight success all over again!

Q: I’ll do my best.

Dylan: That’s all it takes.

Come see the Wallflowers do what they do best on Saturday, Aug. 23. Tickets are still available!

• Who: Jakob Dylan and The Wallflowers
• Where: The Commonwealth Room
• When: Saturday, Aug. 23, 2025
• More info: TheStateRoomPresents.com

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My Morning Jacket headlined a concert at Red Butte Garden on Monday (8/11/2025).  

Not long before My Morning Jacket was set to begin, something that doesn’t normally happen did: the time the band started was bumped up by about 30 minutes or so, all because they wanted to play longer. So, after nearly two-and-a-half hours of 80s-esque lights and hair blowing in the wind and heart-shaped sunglasses and guitar solos and following each hit in its catalog with another, the band from Louisville offered up 23 songs in all. If there wasn’t a curfew to consider, chances are they’d have sailed right past it. While some showmen are committed to leaving their fans wanting more, MMJ is cut from another cloth entirely: they are fans of giving a lot more than you paid for. A welcome change of pace, that.

After 27 years of doing this, the band’s at the point they could stop creating music if they wanted to. Monday night’s concert proved that point many times over. Having listened to and seen the band throughout its long career of bigger-and-better albums, it’s clearly evident that they’re the best they’ve ever been at this rock band thing. And while favorites are always hard to pick, live takes on “At Dawn,” “Off The Record,” “Mahgeetah” and “Holdin On To Black Metal” were each thrills of their own to hear. Prediction/hope? They could take this exact show to Vegas and make everyone happy about doing so for many sold-out months in a row.

Want my high point of the whole evening? Here’s one: For the encore, lead sing-song-sanger Jim James invited Melt’s Veronica Stewart-Frommer to sing “Golden” with him as all the lights behind them shone like stars (or well-placed fireflies). Golden and beautiful, it certainly was, and the melody’s still ringing in my ears.    

Was it one of the best shows we’ll see at Red Butte this summer? Probably. Does making a grand statement like that one matter in the long run? Not a whit.

Photo gallery by Natalie Haws of Beehive Photography. Instagram @beehivephotovideo

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Langhorne Slim and Rayland Baxter co-headlined an unusually intimate concert at The Commonwealth Room on Friday (8/8/25). While it wasn’t a sold-out crowd, it proved to be an immediately devoted one. Langhorne Slim opened the night and immediately fell into his role as a poetic troubadour, offering both stories and songs about the crumbling state of the world, politics, his child (“Song For Silver”), and even the afterlife.

By the time he’d dragged a wooden chair out to the middle of the floor and stood on it, belting out a short burst of music that included “Past Lives,” we were done for. He delivered the latter with an appropriate amount of ferocity (and without needing a microphone); it’s highly possible the crowd collectively fell in love. As far as set finales go, it’s hard to believe he could have left on a higher note.

Baxter offered an incredible 13-song set of originals that included songs like “Strange American Dream,” “Freakin Me Out,” and “Rubberband Man” before inviting Slim back for one more. The two joined forces on Slim’s “The Way We Move”—one and done, leaving the audience wanting infinitely more—but nobody left unhappy. They knew they’d witness something special, and more than one person called it one of the best concerts they’d ever seen. Period. That’s just got to be the exact kind of praise a performer wants to hear. 

Photo gallery by Natalie Haws – Beehive Photography. Instagram @beehivephotovideo

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Waxahatchee performed as part of Salt Lake City’s Twilight Concert Series at the Gallivan Center on Wednesday, Aug 9, 2025, and it was a gorgeous evening to be in the audience. Lead singer Kathryn Crutchfield was in great spirits, casually offering many new favorites from the Grammy-nominated Tigers Blood (“3 Sisters,” “Right Back To It,” “Crowbar”), even including a few from Crutchfield’s other band Plains, a colossal 23 tunes in all. Strange revelation of the evening? Had the distinct thought in the middle of the concert that the band sounded more like Kathleen Edwards than I’d ever previously thought. Had a second thought that the two should never be on the same bill, as they sounded a bit too much like one another. A few songs later, the universe laughed: Waxahatchee did a cover of Edwards’ “Six o’clock News.” They killed the cover, of course, and I spent the remainder of the night trying to figure out what it all meant. Sometimes it’s better not to know, to just bask in what was and find joy in doing that. Speaking of joy, the very next concert in the series is Mt. Joy next Tuesday. See you there?

Photo gallery by Natalie Simpson – Beehive Photography. Instagram @nhsphoto

Waxahatchee performed in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2025, at the Gallivan Center as part of the Twilight Concert Series, photos by Natalie Simpson, Beehive Photography.

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Lukas Nelson performs Friday (8/8/2025) at the Canyons Village, part of its Concerts on the Slopes series.

And it’s fitting that we caught up with Nelson while he was still in Montana earlier this week. He’d just performed with Dave Matthews, Molly Tuttle and others at Big Sky’s Wildlands Festival, raising over $1.3 million for land conservation. His affection for the area shows on his latest release (2025’s American Romance), with a song on it named after the state.

The album is his first without Promise of the real, the band he recorded eight studio albums with, marking a rebeginning of sorts for the Texas-born singer-songwriter.  

“It was about time. In 2009, I met drummer Anthony [LoGerto], then the other guys in the band, and asked them to join me,” Nelson says. “I was listening to a lot of Neil Young at the time and writing all these songs, and we went out and started playing. For three years, we played everywhere, these small gigs. And once Neil [Young] heard us, he liked the band so much, they ended up as his band for five years. I couldn’t book my own gigs anymore because Neil was taking us out [on the road].”

“Because none of the other guys in the band were songwriters, I felt like I wanted to keep playing my own music,” he says. “And the other guys were happy to play with Neil.”

By going his own way, it’s allowing Nelson to continue exploring new ways of sharing his music.

“I was running out of time, and my songs deserved an audience,” Nelson says. “I was going out with my dad [Willie] and on the road 300 days a year, and I wanted an audience that was going to stay with me for a while because they wanted to hear me, not my dad.”

The hope is he’ll have time for projects he couldn’t commit to before, largely due to that gruelling touring schedule. His planned-for 80 or so shows this year frees him up to collaborate more often, including being able to do a duet with his friend Sierra Farrell on his latest (“Friend in the End”). 

And not that it matters, but that means his 92-year-old dad Willie may play on stages then Lukas does this year. But the shift in how much he plays does allow him to spend more time with his pops, too, who inspired him to become a musician in the first place.

“I love my dad’s music, and listen to it almost nonstop,” Nelson says. “I got into a phase with him where I studied it intensely, just like I did with Jimi Hendrix and Dylan and Radiohead.”

Radiohead is one of bands he listens to the most lately, and he admits to having a very wide palette of musical influences. It’s just one of the bands helping guide his next steps, as he’s already considering what comes next.

One thing is certain: he wants to go further than he ever has creatively.

“The way the world is set up now, there’s room for anything. I want to listen to my mind and heart without barriers. The next project I do, you won’t be able to define musically,” Nelson says. “Before, I was working with primary colors, but I’m going to dig deeper into secondary colors, a whole other spectrum. I’m going to get deeper and more psychedelic with it.”

It’s Nelson’s way of giving back to what music has already given him in abundance.

“It’s like they say in religion: you take one step toward god, and he takes three toward you. I stepped toward music and it wrapped its arms around me,” Nelson says. “It cradled me and said it would never let me down, that it would allow me to spread joy wherever I went. I dipped my toe in its water and now we’re betrothed.” 

“Music has given me my life. It chose me, and it’s the greatest blessing I’ve ever received. Without it, I’d be in a very dark place. Now I have a place to put my darkness.”

Tickets are still available.

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Alison Krauss & Union Station performed at Red Butte Gardens’ Outdoor Concert Series last Friday (July 25, 2025) and, once again, promptly sold the place out. The band’s in the midst of its Arcadia Tour (named after their impressive 2025 album of the same name) and had an incredible neon sign onstage in case anyone forgot. Krauss needed little help playing and singing to the gathered mass, but she brought along Willie Dixon and Jerry Douglas anyway, spreading talent in every which way Friday night.

For her part, every song Krauss sang was an immediate soul salve, an invitation to breathe a little easier, a song preceding a long night of rest. She quipped at one point that the collective had mostly sad music in its repertoire — that their entire goal was to leave the crowd feeling far worse than they did before they arrived — but it hardly dampened spirits. Both songs and band received their appropriate spotlight, and we were better off for it. Whether it was Douglas offering frequently long jams on his Dobro or Krauss easing us through the band’s catalog (“Looks Like The End of the Road,” “The Hangman,” even an O Brother Where Art Thou nod with “Down to the River to Pray”), it was a welcome respite to the week. When bluegrass delves into lullaby territory, it creates a mood you don’t ever quite want to stop. Thank you, Alison. Thank you, players.   

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The musical circus, Elephant Revival, is coming to town! On Wednesday, July 30, 2025, the lovely Red Butte Garden Amphitheatre will serve as their proverbial big top. The Nederland, Colorado sextuplet thrills their audiences with a genre-fluid, multi-instrumental newgrass sound, a musical style that blends transcendental folk and Kentucky bluegrass with the devil’s lettuce. It’s folk music–if the folks were Celts, gypsies, and hippies. Their ethereal and earthy, soul-soothing sound will fill our mountains with positive vibes. They’re the perfect elixir for these fractious times.

Band leader Bonnie Paine blends her siren vocals with multiple instruments like the washboard, cello, and musical saw. The six-piece ensemble creates a celestial symphonic sound with guitars, mandolin, fiddle, upright bass, pedal steel, banjo, and a variety of drums. In the past, they’ve included a drumline and aerial acrobats to add to the carnivalesque atmosphere (though I doubt the Red Butte Garden Amphitheatre stage is built for aerial acrobatics.) 

The band formed in 2006 and toured extensively with frequent stops in Utah, including a couple of New Year’s Eve shows at The State Room, which are forever etched in my mind. In 2008, they released their debut self-titled album that featured trippy favorites “Ring Around The Moon” and “Sing to the Mountain.” The band has six full-length LPs to their credit, including my personal favorite, These Changing Skies (2013).  

In 2018, the band announced an indefinite hiatus (a gentle way of saying “breakup”), but fortunately for their legions of fans, they resumed their music-making in 2022 and started touring in 2023 (minus Daniel Rodriguez, who had set off on a solo career). The reconstituted ensemble is back and better than ever!

Here’s a preshow teaser– enjoy their mind-blowing cover of Tool’s “Schism. Click Here for the Video.

Opening is Two Runner, a folk duo from Northern California. Their beautiful harmonies will send you to the right headspace for Elephant Revival’s magical musical experience. Songwriter Paige Anderson and fiddler Emilie Rose blend a twangy clawhammer banjo and fiddle with sweet vocal harmonies. In 2023, they released their debut album Modern Cowboy. The record features a fresh mix of eclectic mountain music that finds a home in the High Sierra, Rockies, or along the Appalachian Trail. The album stretches the boundaries of bluegrass, folk, and country, capturing a majestic sound with minimal instrumentation.

Summer is fading fast, so don’t miss an opportunity to groove on the otherworldly sounds of Elephant Revival in a bucolic setting. It’s also an economical night out, considering you can bring in your tasty treats and soothing libations without paying the inflated concession prices of similar venues.

Who: Elephant Revival w/ Two Runner
What: Red Butte Outdoor Concert Series 2025
Where: Red Butte Garden Amphitheatre
When: Wednesday, July 30, 2025
Info and tickets: https://redbuttegarden.org/concerts/

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Built to Spill returns to The Urban Lounge on Wednesday, July 23, at 7 p.m. In advance of the show, we spoke to Built to Spill frontman Doug Martsch. We caught up to him before a gig in
Minnesota.

He was in a good mood, as well he should be: he’s doing what he loves to do and has done since the band formed over 30 years ago in 1992. The Boise-based rock trio was playing a string of summer dates with Yo La Tengo (another trio keen on making a lot of noise) when we spoke. Even though both bands played Salt Lake’s Kilby Block Party earlier this year, it’s the first time they’ve toured together, and he says it’s been fun.

And when you’re in a band that tours nearly half the year — about 150 shows, give or take — having a good time doing it is likely one of those constants, a goal to always reach for.  

“If you’re having a good night, it feels good. It’s not work at all,” Martsch says about playing live versus being holed up in a studio. While making albums always has felt like starting over from scratch, he says, stepping onto a stage for a few hours always feels easy.

Part of that is about stripping songs down to their most key elements. While he grew up trying to emulate the sounds of his heroes at the time (including Dinosaur, Jr., Butthole Surfers, Camper Van Beethoven), now he spends his time absorbing old soul and reggae records. All are filled with sounds that never feel overly complex. 

There’s a utilitarian nature about the albums created 50 years ago, and those artists delivered their music without adding anything fancy on top, Martsch says, and that’s a draw.

“When I was younger, I was trying to be clever and find chords that were different from what others were doing, finding new melodies. But as I grow older, that no longer matters to me,” Martsch says. “It’s more about who the real person is [for me], a chance to glimpse into someone’s soul. Musically, things are simpler. Now it’s about trying to emote better.”

Playing live always allows for that.

“Just plugging my shit in and playing is much more satisfying. I’ve become more comfortable figuring out ways to play that make sense for me to do, my personal strengths. When you’re young, you’re figuring out what you can do and what limits to push, who you want to sound like. At my age, I know what my limitations are and what I sound like. I can try and do my best within that. Every night I’m up there, I can try to sing and play songs better than I ever have before, and there’s still room to fuck around and make it different from night to night.”

“Most wouldn’t pick up on that, and you would have to see a bunch of our shows to pick up on that happening. But for me, it feels like freedom.”

See for yourself what freedom can sound like this Wednesday. Buy your ticket before the show HERE.

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On Wednesday night (July 16, 2025), Rhiannon Giddens & The Old-Time Revue transformed the Red Butte Garden Amphitheatre stage into their magical, traveling porch, inviting us to join them for an uplifting musical adventure. North Carolina (minus the humidity) became our first sonic waystation with Giddens and Dirk Powell delivering a powerful rendition of Elizabeth Cotton’s “Freight Train.” 

Giddens’ former musical partner in the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Justin Robinson, stepped up on the porch with fiddle in hand to pay homage to the late Joe Thompson, a shared mentor who taught them both the banjo and fiddle tune, “Georgia Buck.” The remaining members of the ensemble joined in with Jason Sypher on upright bass, Amelia Powell on guitar, and rapper Demeanor (Giddens’ nephew) on bones and any other instrument within reach. We stayed in the Carolinas for one more number as the porch-rockin’ string band symphony played “High on a Mountain.” That, we were. 

Our next musical stop was South Louisiana. Dirk Powell led with “Dimanche Apres-Midi” (or Sunday afternoon for us Anglophones), an uplifting accordion-forward Cajun tune followed by the 2-step “Back of Town.” That Zydeco-adjacent sound liberated me from my low-back chair and sent me scurrying to the garden’s dancing space. 

Giddens’ rendition of a Yoruba language folk song, “Laye Olugbon,” then took us to a rich landscape of American roots music in Southwestern Nigeria. That trip across the ocean is an essential part of the American musical flight path. The banjo, brought to us by Afro-Caribbean slaves, occupies a central place in our heritage. Throughout the evening, Giddens & The Old-Time Revue demonstrated the versatility of the banjo and how, for generations, it provided struggling laborers (free and enslaved) with a conduit for telling their stories. Case in point: Giddens’ nephew, Demeanor, performed a genre-bending banjo-driven rap song, “Polyphia.” Don’t look so puzzled. Blending a traditional sound with a modern style, he showed us the best of the American roots tradition. And it all made sense! Come on, Snoop Dogg, grab that four-string!

The captivating, 20-song set made us wonder where we’d go next on our road trip. We landed in Bakersfield, California. Amelia Powell added just the right amount of Merle Haggard honky-tonk twang with her soulful rendition of “Somewhere Between.” Dirk and Amelia Powell (father/daughter) then teamed up with Demeanor on a new song they recently penned together. “Out of Sight” stayed true to its name. The catchy Cajun-roots-pop sound has all the earmarks of a hit. 

Our American roots tour then took us to the Mississippi Delta when Giddens brought out a 1850s-style fretless banjo and shredded an original blues number, “Step Away Blues.”  Who knew you could rock the blues with a banjo?

The evening drew to a close much too quickly. Giddens played “At The Purchaser’s Option,” a fan favorite from her fantastic 2017 folk album Freedom Highway. The ensemble ended the show with A.P. Carter’s “God Gave Noah the Rainbow Sign.” That old-school country gospel tune provided a perfect “amen” to end an evening of American Roots music. 

Giddens returned to the porch and delivered a heart-stirring a cappella version of “Pretty Saro.” Her pitch-perfect, soprano voice wafted over the crowd and echoed through the mountains and back to her audience, who listened intently in the Garden. The full ensemble came out and jammed “Riro’s House” to end a perfect evening.

Fun fact: In addition to a couple of Grammys and a Pulitzer Prize in music, Rhiannon Giddens received a MacArthur “Genius” award for her work to revitalize the black string band tradition. The crowd at Red Butte Garden Amphitheatre on Wednesday night witnessed that brilliance.

Sunny War opened the show with a stellar 8-song solo set. Her dreamy vocals and skillful finger picking immediately won the crowd’s attention. Listeners put aside their precious chickpea dip and chardonnay to fully embrace War’s bluesy folk. I particularly liked her gritty “He Is My Cell.” Then she played two bangers, “No Reason” and “Whole,” from her 2023 album Anarchist Gospel. I was hoping for several tracks from her remarkable new record Armageddon In A Summer Dress, but I guess that’ll have to wait for another time. I would love to see her again with a band at an intimate listening room, such as The State Room or Urban Lounge. 

• Who: Rhiannon Giddens &The Old Time Revue w/ Sunny War
• What: Outdoor Concert Series 2025
• Where: Red Butte Garden Amphitheatre
• When: Wednesday, July 16, 2025
• More from John Nelson

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Ben Kweller paid Salt Lake City’s Urban Lounge a visit on Monday (July 14, 2025). Everyone was as happy to see him arrive as they were sad to see him leave.

It’d been a few years since he played here and, judging from Monday’s crowd, the locals missed him hard. From the time he and his band of merry men showed until the time they called it a night, it felt like a long and intimate embrace, one of those where neither quite wants to let go. Kweller and his band (which notably included Christopher Mintz-Plasse on bass, aka Superbad’s McLovin) played a loose, fast set that borrowed heavily from his latest effort, 2025’s Cover The Mirrors without leaving behind longtime favorites like “Falling,” “Family Tree” and “Sundress.” The 20-song setlist he bounced his way through allowed for a lot of joy (onstage and off) and, considering his latest album is about his late sixteen-year-old son, that’s saying something. It wasn’t a somber look back, but a celebration of a life abbreviated. 

Photography by Nathan Christianson, @npcplus

If you were a more a casual fan than a memorize-every-lyric sort, it was nearly an out-of-body experience to not only watch Kweller thrill, very ably playing musical chairs with himself (flitting from piano to harmonica to guitar and so on), but to be surrounded by so many enthusiastic echoes, fans singing his own words back at him. He invited that response, encouraged it even; he ditched the microphone and guitar to sing most of “On My Way” acapella, leading all like an enthusiastic choir director.

If there were any tears shed that night, they had to have been the happy kind.      

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