Walking into Johnny Brenda’s tavern on Frankford Ave. in Philly, I was initially met with confusion. As I sucked in my gut to squeeze past a drunk in a leprechaun jacket and an active billiards table, listening to the clacking of re-racks and ice in emptied glass, I wondered how they’d ever quell this crowd to listen to an intimate GRAMMY/Oscar-nominated indie artist show. After talking to an employee, I found the staircase that hid a humble printed paper with the show’s information and made my way upstairs.
Here, a coy theater would reveal herself displaying the test of time. Situated between her peeling paint and chipped corners, a well-loved room sat under cobweb-knitted chandeliers that barely clutched onto their last crystals. Upon your entrance, you can feel the fading thump of a typical bar scene downstairs and see how the two have clashed for years. The booming bass from below pushes their roof/our floor up, being stomped down by concert crowds in a tug-of-war that never gives way. The stage was tucked into the corner, shrouded in green light and glowing at the end of the warm-lit bar. It would open to a second story tucking tall curtains under crystal arches, allowing a wrapped frame to cocoon the sound from both stories, seemingly sectioning off our night from the rest of the world.
Tonight’s show would be a bit more subdued, as it would feel like less of a typical concert scene and more of an artist residency, or those “A Night With” shows where the artist is more tangible to the crowd, which Emile Mosseri, certainly was, performing four different requests from the crowd, and having frequent back and forth’s throughout the night. The opener, Paul Dally, would be the same.
Dally would treat the crowd to a couple of wonderful songs, testing a new material and allowing the crowd into his process in a nice showcase of vulnerability. The second track he played, unnamed but I believe to be titled “Fear and Love,” was told to be a special one just for Philadelphia as it had not been played anywhere else on the tour. I was pleasantly surprised by the singer’s deep, resonating voice that rang through the theater reverberating through the rafters. He sounded great and got to showcase his vocals on the closing track “One Horse Town” before leading into the night’s main act.
Mosseri would take the stage with a guitar, hedging toward stage right as the small corner would be cramped with two microphones, multiple bass and guitars, two electric pianos, amps, pedals, wires galore, and a small glass of water. It gave the impression of a man so excited to share his music that he brought all of his toys and gadgets without thought of the spaces they’d booked. It was charming. Opening with “this time i lost my mind,” the show began with a cyclic plucking of circling notes before Mosseri’s voice was introduced to the crowd. Coming off his latest release of the album tryin to be born, a beautifully intimate and strikingly vulnerable 11-track story, the b-side song choice to kick off the show I thought was a wonderful choice to start as it displays the strength in range of the artist’s voice as well as his ability to hold back and softly showcase skill without loudness as a factor.
The singer would also share with us the track, “Home For The Summer,” which is a somberly nostalgic look at visiting a place you used to have much more of an impact on and not taking those moments for granted. Like here in this tavern. Yea, I may have been pissed outside burning gas and circling the venue trying to find a place to parallel park my SUV on a cobblestone path made in the 1600s, but now I’m here, experiencing an alluring performance of beautiful music in the quiet comfortable crowd that I can take a look around at and just innately know that I am welcomed and comfortable.
Three more musicians would then take the stage to back up Mosseri with a full band into “wasting your love,” a groovy plucking bass-pulled track that is smoothed over by buttery vocals that slide through progressing lyrics. The band would stay for “don’t fall back so easily” and “i could be your hands” before exiting the stage and leaving the singer alone for “you and your boyfriend.”
Beforehand the singer would allow the crowd into the background of the song. Originally being written when still a part of his friend-founded band, The Dig, but rejected from their album at the time. Mosseri decided to save the song by electing to rehome it onto a personal project when the time was more right. Depicting a story of inviting a woman and her boyfriend to live with you as the title suggests. It is a comical song that repeatedly drew laughs out of the crowd, yet also gorgeous to listen to as a single set of hands-on keys and a voice that adds a haunting plea to the singer’s many proposals.
The next track would then be an original piano peace that is part of Mosseri’s Oscar-Nominated Score of Lee Isaac Chung’s 2020 film, Minari, a story of Korean American immigrants struggling to start a farm in Arkansas in the pursuit of the American Dream. The score of this film is divine. The emotion that can be felt from these tracks is chilling. It’s a musical feat that thrust the artist into my sphere upon seeing the film, which again, is one of my favorites.
“Jacob’s Prayer” would be next and this track, as well as “Jacob and the Stone” of the same score, are truly two of my favorite pieces of music. It’s a delicate display of music that feels heavy. It's not “bad” heavy, but it weighs the room down. No one moves, or shuffles, or fidgets. Just witnesses. As his hands bounce back and forth over ivory keys, the electric tone gives it a slight tinge of the artificial sound that comes from toy pianos. Suddenly my lens lowers and I’m a little boy mashing the keys of his piano as his family surrounds him telling him how good his terribly off-tempo and abruptly ended cover of the opening riff of “Piano Man” sounds. The notes pulse out from the keys and swing around the curves of the room, meeting each other between my ears and vibrating goosebumps into my skin as the next wave of keys is pressed down. Upon the final chord’s draw, the artist’s wrists raise and lower in a poignant stamp of approval on his work. His head turns around as the slightest draw of panic pulls across his body language, reaching for the mic as the crowd is only now pulled out of their own frames of times gone by, realizing we’ve repaid the man who gave us these glimpses with nothing but silence, preoccupied with times we can’t reach back to. Applause would trickle in before enveloping the theater, a pattern that would become commonplace for any track Mosseri played while sitting at his keys.
The show would include many unique moments such as covers and requests. Touching on Chet Baker and CHIC with “I Get Along Without You Very Well” and “At Last I Am Free” respectively. The latter was one of two songs where Mosseri would get to flex his conducting skills getting the crowd to participate in circling choruses as he would sing on, leading to a really nice intimate moment that stuck with me in the days after.
Mosseri would also perform a string of four requests “Oklahoma Baby,” “In The Shadows,” “Infinite Love,” and “Rose Water.” “Infinite Love” is the singer’s Grammy-nominated arrangement off of the score completed for Miranda July’s 2020 comedy/crime film, Kajillionaire. Performed with original recording pianist Erick Eiser on keys while Mosseri hums lulling bands of frequencies into one clean signal mic, and one distorted mic. Before ripping our emotions apart, Mosseri would joke with the crowd warning that "it might get a little graphic so if you have to look away I understand," while holding the two now phallic-looking mics. The sound from the mics is a unique process that mashes and forms into a combination of resonating harmonies that cry into each other, living and dying in waves of sound that fill the corner theater with haunting siren songs. The song picks up halfway with a deep rising reverberation from Mosseri that builds with intensity as Eiser quickly goes from silence to running laps up and down the length of his keyboard, flowing his fingers over the keys the way children will fake type over a cash register. The two artists conjoin in an experience of sound that leaves you speechless as if these two should be allowed to walk around possessing the ability to just…do that.
Mosseri would close the show with a quiet performance of “Rose Water” alone at the piano before raising a hand and exiting the stage. While I loved the big track moments like “not going anywhere” which has a cacophony of instrumentation that comes crashing into the ending quarter of the song with affected screaming vocals that sounded fantastic and had serious energy, it was the slow moments at the piano that stole the show for me. To come to such an intimate and worn theater to hear a man show off his obscene levels of talent was just such a wonderful night of music. Mosseri continues his tour through the U.S. in March before heading to Europe in April. For an intimate night of artistry, Emile Mosseri’s tour is a can’t-miss.
