Love Is All Around At Alice Phoebe Lou

There was no phone in sight at the Lincoln Theatre, where amber lights cast a warm, intimate glow. Watching John Andrews & The Yawns and Alice Phoebe Lou perform, I felt like I’d been let into the inner workings of their hearts.

John Andrews took the stage in a baseball cap and beat-up Converse, casually admitting he’d been watching Danny DeVito Batman clips backstage. His voice was deeply comforting, accompanied only by an acoustic guitar and electric piano he alternated between. Like a realist film, the minimal production made me pay attention to every detail. 

Then Alice Phoebe Lou stepped out. “It’s so nice to be here and play these songs that I wrote in my bedroom in their original form,” she shared with the crowd. Her set was equally stripped back, with a guitar she would hook onto various pedals. The setlist wove together tracks from her new album Oblivion and older hits like “Hammer,” a dreamy ballad about dismantling your personal walls to let a lover in. My personal favorite was “Lover // Over the Moon,” in which her sultry delivery coaxed the audience into singing softly with her. During “Dusk,” she sang as though the audience were her confidants, drawing the room together: “But the world don’t matter / When we’re looking at each other.”