brendan halpin

I’ve been seeing a lot of older musicians lately, because, I mean, you can’t count on anything in this life except that people don’t live forever, so if someone over retirement age comes to town, you better go if you’re at all interested.

I’m really interested in how people approach a 40- or 50+-year performing career. One way is to just come out and give the people what they want—play the old hits and a few deep cuts and celebrate the fact that you wrote great songs once and we’re all still here to enjoy them. This was the approach Blondie took when I saw them a few summers ago. It was a really fun show.

Another thing you can do is to give a nod to the old stuff but give a concert that leans on your new material just like you would have done thirty or forty years ago. Tom Jones did this, and Nick Lowe did the same thing.

While Tom Jones is a gifted interpreter of other people’s songs, Nick Lowe is a gifted songwriter. Indeed, I’d say he’s probably the greatest living songwriter. And working with Los Straightjackets (a bunch of Americans who play surf instrumentals while wearing luchador masks) seems to have creatively energized him. The man is still writing fantastic songs, and the way Los Straightjackets have helped his music evolve is…well, let’s just say that it’s magic. Because it’s a weird combination that sounds like it shouldn’t work but actually works amazingly, and creates this wonderfully genre-fluid, cool sound.

The show opened with “So it Goes,” but reworked for the new cool surf-rock sound, and proceeded to play most of the new album, Indoor Safari, which is fantastic. Standouts for me are “Blue on Blue” (not the Bobby Vinton song), “Jet Pac Boomerang” and “Trombone.” We also got “I Live on a Battlefield” and “12 Step Program (To Quit You Babe)” from The Impossible Bird and “House For Sale” from The Old Magic before the focus shifted to the old songs at the end of the night.

Nick’s voice sounds great, and he’s very funny and charming on stage. When he took a break mid-show, he joked that he had a side hustle as an Uber driver and was going to get some rides in while Los Straightjackets played without him. This too was a fun part of the show because Los Straightjackets got to engage in some fun showmanship that they keep in check while they’re serving as Nick’s backing band.

The whole show was joyful and lacked the melancholy of the Tom Jones Ages and Stages tour. Nick Lowe definitely looks old, but the performance didn’t feel nostalgic or sad or really about his age at all. It was just a guy who writes great songs playing those songs with the help of some great musicians. The final encore was “Heart” played solo acoustic, and the audience’s silence was reverent. It was just a song we’d all heard before, but it certainly felt like Nick had shared something special with us.

It was great to see a legendary artist in a club setting, but I can’t have been the only over-50 member of the audience who was feeling pretty uncomfortable after two hours of standing in a venue that does not have a single seat. There was one fan in a wheelchair, but I think a venue should expect that a 75-year-old artist may have some fans with mobility and other physical challenges and should do more to accommodate them.

But I am fortunate enough that I am able to stand for two hours, and so I got to see one hell of a show.