After spending much of the first half of 2023 touring the country and recording a new album in L.A., New Haven-based quartet Eggy returned to The Warehouse at Fairfield Theatre Company (FTC) on Saturday night for a highly anticipated Connecticut homecoming. As Stolen Gin opened the evening, Eggy family, friends, and fans old and new filed into the Warehouse, the larger of the two performance spaces at the Fairfield, CT venue complex, for the band’s tenth FTC show dating back to 2017.
The evening had a familial tone from the get-go. As Eggy took the stage, the smooth, soulful sounds of The Five Satins‘ “In The Still of the Night” rang out through the P.A. in homage to a local music hero in attendance, bassist/vocalist Mike Goodman‘s Uncle Bobby Mapp, the drummer heard playing on the 1956 doo-wop classic and a mentor to the young player from the earliest days of his music education.
Goodman, Jake Brownstein (guitar, vocals), Dani Battat (keys, vocals), and Alex Bailey (drums, vocals) seemed to feel the familiarity in the air, as well, loading the setlist primarily with older staples well known to the band’s longest-tenured followers despite the wealth of newer material in their back pockets. Still, the evening’s selections served to highlight just how much Eggy’s sound and ability have evolved in the six years since the band’s first gig at FTC’s StageOne (beyond the whole “we all wear white pants now” thing).
Delivered with surging, collective creativity by all four band members, the performance veered early and often into improvisational waters as the group dressed its time-tested tunes—as well as a go-to cover of Big Theif‘s “Time Escaping”—in unique sounds and approaches. From the gritty “12 Pounds of Pain” riff that bookended the first set to the sprawling “Shadow” that opened the second, Brownstein, Goodman, Battat, and Bailey never looked nor sounded anything but comfortable and focused as they guided their compositions through waves of exploratory interludes and freight-train peaks.
View this post on Instagram
Even a song like “Graceless”, an Eggy setlist stalwart for the better part of a decade, came across like something ripe, something novel, as Brownstein milked the emotional weight of its Patrick Amarante-penned lyrical mantra to hair-raising effect. Even when the familial crowd spilled over onto the stage during the song’s “Material Girl”-infused climax—by way of a luchador hype man later identified as “Lenny the Luch“—the quartet never missed a step, faithfully leaning into the strength of the composition and gracefully converting the hi-jinx into ever-more upward momentum.
Eggy had already made its impact on the “hometown” crowd by the time Jake, Dani, Mike, and Alex returned to the stage for an encore, but that didn’t stop them from churning out yet another highlight with the Bailey-sung “Burritos El Chavo 2”. After an evening heavy on improvisational high points, Eggy elevated this “Eleanor Rigby”-inflected “Burritos” head and shoulders above the rest of the show, appropriately rounding out the night with a smile, a wink, and an implied note of gratitude to the hometown day-ones: “Thank you. We love you. This is just the beginning.”
Eggy will get back at it this coming week with a performance alongside Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country in Hamilton, OH on Thursday, May 25th ahead of a busy weekend at Chillicothe, IL’s Summer Camp Music Festival. For a complete list of upcoming Eggy 2023 tour dates, head here. See below for the full setlist from the Saturday night Eggy show at The Warehouse at FTC in addition to photos via David Gray/Gray Peak Images and a pro-shot video of the 20-minute “Finding and Losing” from set two.
Eggy – “Finding and Losing” [Pro-Shot] – 5/20/23
Setlist [via thecarton.net]: Eggy | The Warehouse at FTC | Fairfield, CT | 5/20/23
Set One: 12 Pounds of Pain, Apology, High Noon -> Upside Down, Time Escaping [1], One Stop Shop [2]
Set Two: Shadow, Finding and Losing, Graceless, Wayless [3]
Encore: Burritos El Chavo 2 [4]
Footnotes:
[1] Big Thief cover
[2] With 12 Pounds of Pain teases
[3] With appearance from Lenny The Luch and Material Girl (Madonna) teases
[4] With Eleanor Rigby (The Beatles) teases
