Pop musicians have a reputation for artificiality, but there was nothing manufactured about Delaney Silvernell’s show at Albany’s Fuze Box last Friday. The former contestant of The Voice gave a down-to-earth performance of songs straight from the heart to an audience of loved ones.
Originally from Queensbury, Silvernell left New York state to study music at Berklee College of Music, then relocated to Los Angeles to pursue a career in pop stardom. This show was a homecoming. Half the audience were people she grew up with and hadn’t seen since high school, she said, adding, “Every time I come back it’s a different kind of nostalgia.”
The show began with beloved local band Tom’s House, whose set of retro late-’70s/early-’80s prog rock jams was plagued by audio issues. The two vocalists struggled to be heard against the rest of the seven-piece ensemble. At one point, the lead singer/guitarist’s mic stopped working. “It’s okay!” he shouted pluckily. “I don’t need it!”
“Play another one!” the audience cheered as a sound tech dashed back and forth with cables in a valiant attempt to restore the mic.
“We’re trying!” the singer cried.
Silvernell happily bopped along with the rest of the crowd to Tom’s House, alongside her boyfriend/videographer Mark and her producer/songwriting partner Alisse Laymac. Then it was time to play. She ascended the stage in a flouncy burgundy dress and opened her performance with “Wildflower,” a heartfelt ballad tinged with country-western twang. Her musical influences are “versatile,” she said, drawing on Adele, Faye Webster, Raveena, and Lake Street Drive.
Between belting out songs in her powerful voice, Silvernell spoke in bubbly murmurs. This was the first show of the tour, she said, and her energy was giddy. Introducing the R&B‑influenced “My Zen,” she laughed, “this next song has so many swear words.” When she and the band rehearsed it in a theater the day before, a performing arts group for children wandered in, and the mortified singer had to scramble to make the lyrics G‑rated. “We had to censor ourselves,” she recalled.
The songs were personal pieces, made and performed organically with love. Silvernell and Laymac “literally made ‘My Zen’ in a car parked somewhere,” the singer said. Many of the songs, like the bluesy “Dark Side of the Moon,” are about her boyfriend Mark, but “completely embellishing situations” to be more dramatic, she confessed. Silvernell’s keyboard was blanketed with little hand-written “cheat sheets” to guide her through the performance.
In stark contrast to the polyamorous millennial goths who usually haunt Albany’s beloved hamburger joint-turned-punk club, an atypically normal crowd came to the Fuze Box to see Silvernell: men in backwards baseball caps, women with nothing pierced but their ears. They swayed all around the edge of the dance floor until Silvernell drew them in.
“If you’re standing, I invite you to stand here, too,” she said, gesturing to the space near the front of the stage before launching a cover of Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle.” It worked. She got them dancing. They just needed permission.
