If you missed your chance to see Tracy Bonham in a smoke-filled ’90s concert venue, you were able to repent for your sins at the Lost Church, which isn’t even a church. Luckily for you (or is it divine intervention), it’s a cozy 50-seater with acoustics that would make a choir blush.
Blake Morgan took the stage first. The native New Yorker was decked out in a black suit with a black shirt, even a black tie. Playing a silver guitar, it makes one wonder whether he’s an Oakland Raiders fan.
A good storyteller, Morgan sharing many anecdotes from the road, which for him covered 75,000 miles during the past 2 years. And as is common these days, some of those anecdotes had political overtones. One of them ended with his encouraging us to vote, and if we couldn’t do it for us, could we at least do it for him? San Francisco seemed to be a safe space for him.
Morgan switched to his keyboard for a song, showing a professional aptitude for playing the piano. He introduced “Baby I Would Want You” as an “apocalyptic love song.” He also threw in how his girlfriend once asked him whether he would watch all 79 episodes of the original Star Trek with her. The song itself was very Posies-esque, but I was busy trying to figure out what she must have thought of Tribbles.
“Helping Hand” was a duet, with Tracy Bonham joining the stage for the first time. It would set a tone in that later he would join her on stage for several songs, including “Luck.”
Morgan finished his hour long set with a couple more on the keyboard, channeling his inner Ben Folds.
After a 20-minute break, Bonham took the stage for an hour or so. She sat behind the same keyboard-set-to-piano and launched into “Naked.”
The first thing you notice about Bonham is she sings even better now than she did during her initial rise to fame more than 20 years ago. The easiest job in the world must be to mix her vocals.
Her tremendous range extended to “Devil’s Got Your Boyfriend,” even causing her to pause and observe how the room’s acoustics enabled her to even hit the low notes.
On that point, the Lost Church has the best sound of any venue I’ve been to. The small capacity helps, but regardless, a tech bro could read the phone book, and it would sound great.
The Lost Church is less a place for a show and more a place to have a passive conversation with a performing artist. Or an active one, as there were a few back and forths with the crowd.
Anyway, the deal with Bonham is she rerecorded her 1996 record, the Burdens of Being Upright, calling the modernized version, Modern Burdens.
As part of this, she played the original and redone style of “Brain Crack,” the original on her violin, then the new version on the keyboard. It’s a fine example of the detailed thought she put into the new record.
Introducing my favorite song of hers, “the One,” she explained how it was originally about a misogynistic ex, and to be inspired to rerecord it, all she had to do was project 45’s face onto her ex’s body. It was just that simple.
At least one person cried during her performance of it. There were probably others, but I was too … distracted to notice. If you’ve heard One Dove’s piano reprise of “White Love,” it had the same haunting effect.
Rather than apocalyptic, she introduced “All Thumbs” as a “clumsy love song.” Bonham continued to show off her range in this number. She mentioned adopting a child, and you have to be jealous when you think of all the lullabies that must be sung before bed.
Bonham then dedicated “Something Beautiful” to a couple in the audience she was staying with. It was nearly their two year anniversary, and it turns out she also played the song at their wedding. What a good friend!
She updated the second verse of “Mother Mother” to reflect current events, which garnered a laugh from the audience. To be clear, her performance here was just as flawless as the rest of the set, but the relative complexity of every other song shows how the “hit single” can’t help but feel less by comparison. But of course the audience ate it up. No one attended this show by accident.
It’s cliche, but seeing Tracy Bonham in 2018 is seeing her again for the very first time.
Steven Wilson is easily one of the most prolific recording artists of the last couple of decades. At the same time he was the main creative force behind Porcupine Tree, he also managed a number of side projects like Blackfield, No-Man, and Storm Corrosion, as well as remixing numerous classics by Yes, King Crimson, XTC, and others. After Porcupine Tree was put on an indefinite hiatus—there is still yet to be any official “end” of the band—Wilson’s solo career has flourished even further, defying genre expectations of the “progressive rock” scene in favor of creating honest artistic expression. His latest work, To The Bone, continues to push forward towards the art of “pop” even further than his last release, while still maintaining a melancholic edge that has been a theme of his work for quite some time. The North American leg of the To The Bone tour is coming to an end and I caught his Los Angeles performance at the historic Wiltern in Korea Town.
