The Symposium and John Myrtle
Johnny Brenda's
1201 Frankford Ave.
Philadelphia
July 27, 2025
This past Sunday night, Johnny Brenda’s hosted Chicago-based indie rock band The Symposium, with singer-songwriter John Myrtle from London serving as opener on his first stateside tour.
When Myrtle took the stage, clad in a Canadian tuxedo, his lefty small-bodied Takamine acoustic strapped high on his chest, there was an immediate and inarguable affability and warmth, his personality matched by his songs. He’s a charming Brit with a smooth, breathy voice, and I was earnestly digging the craft of his songs, which brought to mind early mop-top Beatles (particularly Paul’s songs) — I mean that sort of Tin-Pan-Alley, gently-swinging thing with effortless melodicism and sticky sweetness. Myrtle is obviously a songwriting student who’s studied the classics and knows his way around a secondary dominant; the songs were catchy, to be clear, and had clever turnarounds, rhythmic change-ups, and other deceptively tricky musical devices. I clocked not one, but two songs in 7/4 time.
Okay. So now that I’ve put that out there, and now that you’ve maybe gathered the kind of insufferably analytical close attention I’m paying to the songs and what they’re structurally made of, I have to offer some honest complaints. The performance was unfailingly sweet and effortless to a fault; I would have liked to see more strain, more audible effort, not in the performance per se but in the songs themselves. Case in point: Myrtle introduced one song by asking if we liked spiders, then announced the next tune’s name: “Spider On The Wall." Later: “Does Philly like dogs? This song’s about my dog. It’s called ‘The Dog Song'.” Another example: “This song is about the rain. It’s called, ‘The Ballad of The Rain’.” It started to feel like a Flight of the Conchords bit, but I don’t think it was.
I know it’s hard to be alone up on stage and delivering your songs, believe me, and I don’t want to be overly critical of a set I genuinely liked by a musician with a wonderful voice and guitar style. But I think we can violate the dictates of folk-coffee-house performance style – namely the one where we tell the audience what the next song’s about – if it’s going to be plain as day to anyone with ears. At a certain point, too much smoothness, gentleness, and politeness becomes grating, and I yearn for noise, clutter, conflict.
Myrtle closed his set with a lovely tune, a crooked bossa-nova-type jawn that showed off his mastery of shell voicings and a falsetto that elicited “woo’s!” from the packed young crowd. I couldn’t help but smile and feel bad for having any misgivings to begin with. He’s plainly talented, and not all art needs to be serious, or deep. Still, it brought to mind and tested that adage about singers so good you could listen to them sing the phone book — the rest of us need to write good lyrics, or at least effectively distract from or obscure the plainness of the ones we’ve got. I just wished that some of the words were a little less on the nose (in the “june/moon” rhyme file, I submit: “care/share”). I wished that he had some songs with a little more meat on the bone — just enough that I was getting a balanced meal.
Or unbalanced! Which reminds me: there was an amusing between-song-banter-zone moment where he talked about how much he wanted to have a Philly cheesesteak while he was here but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. This was pretty typical first-time-in-Philadelphia crowd work stuff but it took on a bit of unintentional resonance for me in terms of what I was getting from his songs. Eat that cheesesteak, man. It’s not good for you, but it just might be exactly what you need.