Michael Martin Doherty, Jake McKelvie, A Box of Stars
A Man Full of Trouble
127 Spruce St.
Philadelphia
May 6, 2026
“Who here doesn’t like being at the oldest of something?” That’s how Michael Martin Doherty put it, addressing the small group gathered at A Man Full of Trouble, which we kept referring to throughout the night as the oldest tavern in North America. I don’t know if that’s exactly true, but here’s how the official copy goes: “Built in 1759, A Man Full of Trouble is the only pre-revolutionary war tavern remaining in the city of Philadelphia. Closed to the public since 1996, it has now re-opened as a 25-seat tasting room and bar...” The space is tiny and intimate – like a lot of the spaces that host the kinds of shows I like – but aside from being simply old, A Man Full of Trouble has this excellent quality of feeling and functioning like a real old school meetinghouse: last night, the three performers took turns playing in the corner, while everyone just sat where they were, and in between sets, everyone stayed put, and talked, and drank. It’s lovely when that happens, when the floor doesn’t immediately clear because the space itself isn’t comfortable or conducive for hanging out, and I was heartened that for all performers, the crowd was quiet, respectful and attentive, and listened closely enough that the funny and bizarre lyrics – which Doherty, Jake McKelvie and A Box of Stars each had plenty of – elicited laughs throughout the night.
Speaking of lyrics: Jake McKelvie! A master! I was thoroughly impressed by this young songwriter from Worcester. With a fantastic tone and guitar style on his lightly-tremolo’d Telecaster, and a command of song forms and bluesy embellishments springing from Tin Pan Alley and The Great American Songbook, McKelvie writes songs that, for all their breezy tunefulness, never repeat a lyric: they’re completely packed with inventive turns of phrase, internal rhymes, and observant humor, with true narrative thrust and word counts that rival the length of these recaps I’m writing. He does all this with a degree of refinement that makes not a word feel out of place, nothing extraneous or wasted. It was a buffet of prosody, unrelenting and complete: like watching a movie with a twist where you think, “I need to watch that again from the beginning,” McKelvie’s songs hit you with enough surprises that you wanted to hear each one again and again. There’s so much to savor. It’s better in the music than strictly on the page – you get the full effect – but I loved this portion of the song “Wiki Change," from 2024’s A New Kind of Hat:
There’s the way you tend to take it
And the way I tend to make it
There’s the way you tend to always reconstruct my heart then break it
There’s the way I tend to wonder while I’m inching toward the door
If in fact I still can take it anymore
There’s a final destination for an everlasting buzz
It’s one last simple wiki entry change from is to was
Closing the night was my friend Michael Martin Doherty, best known for fronting the band Another Michael. In stripped-down solo mode, Doherty was loose and experimental, exhibiting his range: he's a versatile and unfailingly heart-wrenching singer, but also, now more than ever, a funny and weird lyricist: in a new, unreleased song, he sang, with beautiful, emotive seriousness: “There’s so much sadness out in space / You can’t make omelettes there / There’s no eggs! / And there were no chickens / Until now / And you can’t fly / You can’t fly away,” before launching into a perfectly amateurish tin-whistle solo. (If you watch the portion of his set I filmed, you may enjoy an appearance from me at the end, playing the banjo and wiggling around a lot.) Regarding the oldest-tavern debate he had this to say: “I was just in Québec City and I went to a tavern there, and they said they were the oldest tavern in North America (the crowd cheerfully booing now) – but the year they were giving us was, like, 1933.” On a night full of little marvels, A Man Full of Trouble stays holding that crown; this is only the second show they’ve done here this year – you can read my recap of the first here – and I hope there’s many more to come.
