Enjoyed last night’s Damien Rice concert. I was thinking it would be an intimate little concert for 500 or so in Madison Square Garden’s side venue, WaMu Theatre. I’d never been there. Of course NY small means 5,500 people! I had to see him here because maybe 100 people in Hawaii know who he is and would go to see him, hardly enough to bring him all the way from Ireland.

It’s kind of a bummer to go from imagining 500 people and an intimate setting and see 10 times that many, but it was actually intimate enough for all to hear one man shout, “I love you!” to Damien. And intimate enough for the crowd to shush people making too much noise while Damien sang, his vocals too beautiful to be interupted by a few rubes. It worked. Considering the size of the venue, the sound was excellent, everything you’d want out of an acoustic set.

He had a full band and spoke in thoughtful, if fitful spurts, causing one woman behind me to urge, “Spit it out!” as he stammered his way through his thoughts about unrequited crushes, integrity of past eras, and father-son relationships. Toward the end of his set, he even did a little improv song-writing, asking the audience for chords, a mood, a color and a name. Well, the resulting song wasn’t very happy. It was a Damien Rice tune. He was apologetic, saying he intended it to be the happy song the audience wanted. Well, what can you expect when you get a B chord plus an already melancholy A minor; they don’t exactly go together.

I don’t go to many concerts these days because I find most music to be redundant or idiotic. I go to concerts to see something new or original, or determine whether a phenomenon is packaged or the real deal. Damien Rice is the real deal.

The Daily News had this to say about him:

“Some singers seem to bring their voices from a place deeper than the throat and the lungs. They seem to be singing from the unconscious, a place primordial and pure.
Damien Rice has that mystic quality. … Only a handful of singers can get to such a place. Interestingly, other than Ray LaMontagne, all of them hail from the U.K. or Ireland, including Van Morrison, David Gray and Nick Drake.”