This weekend I had the great pleasure of seeing my good friend Ehren Ebbage play two shows. He played The Hotel Cafe in Los Angeles on Friday night, following LA-based Pedestrian for a late show, and he played The Gypsy Den in Santa Ana Saturday night.
For his set at The Hotel Cafe, Ehren was joined on stage by Pedestrian’s Zac Rae. Zac produced Ehren’s 2008 album, “Ten Cent Souvenir,” and I’d heard a lot of good things about him, but I was unprepared for how completely he lived up to the hype. As Ehren played his acoustic guitar and sang, Zac accompanied him on (alternately) two different electric guitars, keyboards, and piano. At one point, he was playing the keyboard and the piano simultaneously, and I think I was watching with my mouth hanging open. When I approached him after the show to tell him how impressed I was, he struck me as being completely uncomfortable being singled out– very humble.
During both sets, Ehren impressed me with the strength of his vocals and his growing ability to command the audience’s attention. Although I’ve seen him play dozens of times over the past few years, this weekend was the first time I really appreciated one aspect of his (and other musicians’) skill set– he has got to have at least four arrangements of each of his songs.
I’m most familiar with the acoustic versions, since he usually tours alone, but I’ve also seen him open for Los Lonely Boys and Jonny Lang with a full band, I’ve seen him play with just a bass player and a drummer, and now I’ve seen him play with a keyboardist/backup guitarist. Every time, the audience would have had no reason to suspect that the songs ever sounded any different than they did in that moment.
I’m embedding here my rough video of his song “Come Quiet” from The Gypsy Den, which is, by the way, quickly becoming my favorite intimate venue in So Cal. I’ll write more about that in a separate post, though.
I’m also experimenting with ways to embed audio. Ehren’s getting a lot of milage out of ReverbNation, so I’m trying their audio widget here:
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