I Just Read About That…

[ATTENDED: October 10, 2018] Lorkin O’Reilly

Lorkin O’Reilly is a Scottish musician who has been living in upstate New York for the past while.  He opened for Gruff Rhys.

Other than the fact that he worked construction a bit (and wrote a song about his boss), I don’t know much more about him.

However, because Philadelphia loves to start construction projects before adequately preparing the drivers for said projects, I wound up being a little late to the show.  I don’t think I missed much from Lorkin (maybe a song and a half?) and what I heard was excellent.

Lorkin is a wonderful guitar player.  He has an excellent fingerpicking style and really creative use of capos and tuning.

He uses one capo for what looked like four strings, leaving the two lowest strings un-capo’d which means he can play notes on the lower strings and using the higher strings as open tuning and then jump back to playing chords below the capo. For one song he even used two capos.

I’m not sure how long he has lived in the States, but he really doesn’t have the Scottish accent anymore.  But he does have that Scottish/British busker’s voice–powerful and resonant.

He had some good banter, although with all of the tuning he could have used some more for sure.

The show was not very well attended so he made a joke that everyone sitting at the bar (there were a few) could come over to the “living room” and watch.  He then joked that he could only say that once or else it would get very awkward.

I enjoyed his songs quite a lot and decided to get his CD which has minimal accompaniment but which fleshes out his songs nicely.