NOTE: All photos are copyright of Howard Shiau Photography 2025
It feels like we just saw South African singer/songwriter Alice Phoebe Lou (aka Alice Matthew) in Brooklyn last July. Maybe because she has been on the road non-stop. After taking just a couple of months off in 2024, she flew from Berlin to Cambridge, MA to kick off her 2024 North American tour. The first four shows of the tour were to be solo gigs before the rest of the band joins her in Vancouver. When her London fans found out she was playing in Cambridge, they started freaking out, not realizing it was not Cambridge in the UK. Lucky for us!
The opener was Sam Burton, a tarot card reader who also happens to be a singer/songwriter. In fact, he met Alice Phoebe Lou when he did a reading for her! He released his second studio album “Dear Departed” in 2023 and toured with Kate Bollinger and Weyes Blood. His sound really brings you back to the day of the 70s singer/songwriters. There was something a little off about the guitar playing and he explained that he was actually using Alice’s guitar, which is a bit small for his hands. Either way, it was a nice mellow way to start the evening, just what we needed.
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Alice Phoebe Lou came out in very comfortable clothing, appropriate since she was still very jet-lagged from her flight in from Berlin. She mentioned that the visa cost and requirements in the US have gotten harder to deal with. That has to be hard on smaller acts as they try to tour. The US is a very large market but it’s already hard enough for them to make money since it’s so expensive to tour. It’s really unfortunate that we need to treat artists this way.
She kicked off the show with “Halo” from her 2023 album “Shelter”. The setlist was heavily weighted to her last two studio albums with an occasional older track thrown in. As she mentioned later, she had a list of over twenty songs on a sheet of paper and deciding on the fly which ones to play. A couple of highlights were “Lately”, performed on keyboards, as it was originally written rather than the album version, and a new song that she doesn’t quite know where it’s going yet. About a third of the way through her set, she decided she needed to sit and moved her bench in front of her mic so she could sit while playing guitar.
Alice was in a very talkative mood, perhaps due to the jet lag, making the fans extremely happy. One of her funny lines was “Oh fuck! I need to tune in a different tuning so I need to talk some more shit.” Too funny! Also when someone shouted that she was an icon, she said that she was just a little girl with a big cup.
If you’ve seen Alice’s full band show, the vibe of this solo show was completely different. Playing just the acoustic guitar or keyboards, her voice was so expressive and emotional that some of the fans literally had tears coming out of their eyes. It’s hard to describe how much more personal this show felt, as if you were sitting in her living room as she played just for you and a few friends. If you can catch Alice Phoebe Lou at one of her solo shows this week, it will be well worth your time.
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