I never like to miss a Danny Michel show, so I left the Starlight Lounge early to make sure I caught at least one set from him at the Slice, June 16.
The always affable Ontario musician, who always has a twinkle in his eye and whose voice bears an uncanny resemblance to Paul Simon, was his usual exuberant self, standing centre stage with his well worn red hollow body guitar. He weaved and bobbed around the microphone, grinned and cracked jokes with the receptive audience. I expected the Slice to be standing room only for the show, but sadly was not, though there were about 40 people who trickled in by the end of the first set.
A lot of the people had never seen him before as he found out when he asked them if he played “Whale of a Tale,” one of his really older crowd favourites the last time he visited.
While he is touring in support of his brand new tenth CD “Matadora,” his first set included mostly crowd favourites from his previous CDs.
He kicked off his set on a chipper note with one of my favourites “ This Feeling” from his 2010 CD “Sunset Sea.” He drew a lot of applause for his beautiful guitar solo, which seemed to surprise him.
Another one my favourites “ Wish Willy” from the same CD was next, though he stopped mid song to tell the story of how he wrote it about an out of the way bar in Belize, not knowing it was actually a whorehouse. He was able to talk about the school he set up to help kids there get a high school education and related how they asked him why he was writing about the whorehouse.
“I didn’t know there was a back room there,” he quipped before continuing with the next verse.
He played a beautiful rendition of another older favourite “Sad and Beautiful World.”
He introduced first new song of the night, his “sweet little space song” “Samantha in the Sky With Diamonds” by talking about becoming a pen pal with astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti while she was on the international space station and e-mailing her back and forth after giving a rough demo of the song to astronaut Chris Hadfield, who passed it on to her.
“So now I have a pen pal in space,” he laughed.
“Though most of her e-mails were ‘I’m busy.’”
His banter took a more serious tone as he talked about writing the new song “Paris, Las Vegas” during the shootings in Paris, France, which got him thinking about what the people in Paris, Las Vegas were doing at the moment.
Things got back to happy as he talked about the really old song “Whale of a Tale” and being inspired by the tall tales of a guy at the bar he was playing at in Welland, Ontario. He ended it with a few bars of “Joy to the World,” noting he was waiting for a tall tale to properly bookend the song, and found it when the guy said he played “Joy to The World” for the Pope.
Michel ended his first set with one of his best known songs “ Tennessee Tobacco,” and looped quick rhythms and played tasteful countrified solos over it, which each drew applause from the enraptured audience.
