The Bar is the Living Room

The Boy I Used To Be

‚Living Room Concert’ at Unders Vienna, Austria 20181116

The concept of living room concerts is to go home and play at a private place of someone. But to some people the living room is no room at their flat our house, but a bar or even a street, where they like to spend their time. And so this living room concert takes place at the favorite bar of the artist himself: the Unders.

The bar is situated close to the subway station Nußdorfer Straße. Few steps downstairs, and the door opens to a welcoming bar, where you can find your favorite beer or e.g. a “Pfeffi”, for which The Boy I Used To Be makes advertisement in the very beginning of his concert. As a stage, they placed a table in a corner, but it seems to fit so well, that one could think it just belongs right there.

Philipp Timmelmayer then starts his set with the beautiful “On The Run”. The capo is placed on the higher strings, the melody he plays on the lower ones. He says he likes to tell stories, but mainly without any punch line. He thought he would maybe play in front of five people, but the bar basically is fully crowded. He greets a friend and also the “most beautiful man in the bar”. Only few guys leave the place because they would like to talk, the rest is stunned and listening. Bartender Sebi meanwhile manages to serve the people without disturbing the concert at all.

The “expressive melancholic music” just seems to fit to the place and bars in general. For “Heart Of Stone”, Philipp nearly is screaming. About his love song the boy tells he “doesn’t like love songs, but this one, it’s cool.” For “Drunk” he records the stumping of his foot on the loop station, just one musical highlight. Another one is “Waiting For The Ocean”, the last song before the encore, that he tells is “one of the first songs I wrote for the boy”. That the set had a duration of about an hour seems completely unlikely as it felt like way less.