High Time

By his own admission, Michael Penn isn’t a song-and-dance man. (His stage presence is, one might say, subdued.) Twiddling his strings at his Friday night show at World Café, he confessed “I’m a chronic tuner with no gift of gab,” and encouraged showgoers to grab the audience mic between song breaks to offer up “a really good joke, a fun fact, even a well placed heckle!”

The crowd didn’t really comply, but no matter. Here and there, he kept us entertained with news of the day: “They shot Stephen Hawking into zero-gravity!” “Did anybody see that video of Bush dancing? People in Russia must think they’re fucked!” and commentary on our fair city, “I love this place. Everyone’s wearing my name on their shirts.”

No one minded the occasional lack of patter. We came for the music, and that didn’t disappoint. Stripped down and almost solo (his keyboardist, Jebin Bruni, accompanied him on about half the songs), he tore through crowd favorites like “Look What the Cat Drug In”, “Figment”, “Bunker Hill”, and “I Can Tell.” He played killer kazoo on “Me Around,” got sultry on “Cupid’s Got a Brand New Gun,” and drew out the sweetly tinged melancholy of “Walter Reed.”

At the end, we called for more, and he graced us with two encores. I’d read he hates playing “No Myth” on stage (he joked that the song is “Michael Penn’s Greatest Hit”), but he must have had a change of heart. He finished the night with it, and we all sang along.

image credit: The Mark Spector Company