Danny Michel oozed happiness when he returned to Lethbridge to play the Slice, Nov. 24 with a big beaming smile on his face and his hollow-body Gibson slung over his shoulder.
I caught the first set filled with enjoyable jokes, stories and plenty of audience favourites for a close to sold out crowd who mostly sat enraptured watching him perform.
“ It’s great to see so many of you out on a school night,” he beamed after beginning his show shortly after 9 p.m.
He played many of the songs off his previous couple CDs he recorded in Belize beginning with an immediate highlight “This Feeling” from “Sunset Sea” and followed it up with another catchy number “A Cold Road” from his Juno Nominated 2012 album “Black Birds are Dancing Over Me.”
He played another of my favourites “Wish Willie” and told a story abut he and his girlfriend at the time hanging out at a Belize brothel while not knowing it was a brothel and writing a song about it, which he followed up with a song about the brothel itself called “Island Queen.”
He played some beautifully, lilting guitar and sang like Paul Simon as he cracked jokes and even added a few bars of the Spiderman theme into one of his solos. He thanked his audience for helping his charity to help a school in Belize by raising $68,000 for it.
He looped a couple rhythms and soloed over them for a couple songs, then scurried over to the Slice’s out of tune piano to play over those rhythms before observing the piano needed to be tuned.
He wound down his peppy first set with a couple of crowd favourites “ Sad and Beautiful World” and ended with an extended jam on “Feather, Fur and Fin.”
