Kevin Morby’s latest album Singing Saw is robust with instrumentation, full of horns and pianos and strings and layers of orchestrated, textured soundscapes. There are twenty people credited as personnel on the album. Twenty. So when his tour dates for 2016 went up, I was curious to see how he’d perform. The staggering force behind his recorded music seemed nearly impossible to recreate live, on stage, let alone at a small venue like the Bootleg Theater in Westlake. But let me tell you, he pulled it off.

Morby somehow turned a twenty-person caliber opus into a four-person hour-long set, replete with electricity and vigor, and basically blew everyone’s mind away.

Morby was backed up by longtime collaborating drummer Justin Sullivan, guitarist Meg Duffy and bassist Cyrus Gengras. Seeing Duffy on lead, with her powerful wails and haunting, elongated chords, especially on “Singing Saw”, was incredible. I can’t begin to explain how rare and wonderful it is to see a female lead guitarist in a band full of dudes. The crowd was enthralled.

During “I Have Been to the Mountain”, a song dedicated to and inspired by Eric Garner and the subsequent injustice surrounding his death, a few people in the audience, whether conscious of the songs heavy undertones or not, raised their fists up high, pounding them to the beat, to the proverbial mountain, to defiance and justice and passion. It was rad.

Morby and his band wove through his repertoire, playing older songs like “Miles, Miles, Miles” and newer ones like “Dorothy” and “Destroyer”. He hit all the notes, swathed in a blue blazer and bolo tie, and ended his set with a cover of Townes Van Zandt’s “No Place to Fall”. And as the lights flickered on over the dim Bootleg stage, I couldn’t help but see an artist on the brink of stardom. —Maya Eslami 

Watch Kevin’s video for “Dorothy” here: