People I Love
PhilaMoca
531 N 12th St.
Philadelphia
June 26, 2024
Dan Poppa winced during the soundcheck as he requested some fine-tuning on the guitar levels. From my front row view, it seemed like he knew how he wanted his music to resonate — but was pained by outsourcing or publicizing the precision it takes to get his art just right.
“People I love” is the name of Poppa’s solo project and latest album. After seeing Poppa perform live at PhilaMoca Wednesday night, backed by Lucy Mondello on bass and Avery Kaplan on drums, I immediately recognized the band’s sound as “music I love.”
I also recognized Poppa, who has been making music for years as an admired contributor to Connecticut’s small and scrappy DIY music scene. Having grown up in the same sad state as Poppa, I was softly familiar with the name of his popular, lo-fi band Waveform* — but it wasn’t until I saw the now Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter-producer’s most recent live show in Philly that I actually heard his true voice.
Poppa played a mix of new songs alongside tracks from People I love, which he released back in January of this year. His set of diverse but stylistically symmetrical songs were sandwiched by two slowcore bands, Philly-based pop group “22° Halo” and the Texas-rooted “Teethe,” the latter of which Poppa is slated to perform with three times this week.
It’s rare that I go to a local show with three bands I’ve never listened to and walk away wanting to hear more from every artist, as was the case Wednesday night. Poppa’s music still stood out. Whereas Teethe, made up of an army of five stellar guitarists, played a somewhat one-note performance (albeit a high note) with their subdued vocals and dissociative instrumentation, Poppa’s performance was a wildly human showcase of emotional ups and downs, each song a distinct composition but every one of them holistically captivating and thematically aligned around internal strife, chaos and meaning making.
“I wish I was perfect, so beautifully worth it,” Poppa whined in one confessional indie anthem: “Wish I was perfect, I need to control it.”
Poppa’s voice was raw and strained, embodying the emo truths of all the lyrics splayed on stage. His tonality fit the message in a manner that felt parallel to the addictively nasal voice of Wheatus’ Brendan Brown on “Teenage Dirtbag.” In other words, Poppa’s imperfect pitch made his geniusly emotive songs feel real, and further positioned Poppa as the perfect person to sing them.
With the obscured shyness and awkward intensity of a shaggy-haired Neil Young, Poppa showed up for every song, releasing an abrasive dissonance through shoe-gazey feedback screech that growled the set forward without compromising the genuine integrity of Poppa’s howling guitar licks or poetic, one- to two-minute song structures. Some pieces crawled through my ears with a haunted beauty. Others introduced a hard-rock intensity that could stomp over Led Zeppelin. Many more traced organic loops around a deep-set melancholy, the universal feeling played up by both of the closing and opening acts.
When I got home, I immediately sought out People I Love’s recorded work. Though I wasn’t surprised to hear how pristinely self-produced all of Poppa’s tracks are — featuring gorgeous trails of flute-like instrumentals, for example, that weren’t replicated in a live setting — I was taken aback by how whispery and smooth Poppa’s voice came across.
The recorded stuff is like an angelic collision of Elliott Smith and Alex G — a combination that, in practice, is even better than you’d imagine based on titles alone. But even as I enjoy listening to People I Love through ear buds, I miss the yearning honesty of Poppa’s voice straight from his mouth to the mic.
Just as I’m glad to have discovered a musician whose career I’ll actually keep following, I’m grateful to have experienced his live presence and loved it even more than his edited tapes. It speaks to the way Poppa picks up on the symbiotic tension between walking through the world as a flawed person and sustaining a drive to draft art that perfectly articulates oneself.
The following lines, from Poppa’s song “Riddle,” stay stuck in my head: “I had to run away/ From the riddles shame/ Do you wanna calm down/ Oh you, do you have to scream now?”
NEXT:
People I Love is playing two shows this week in Boston and D.C. Follow the band’s Instagram here to stay updated on Poppa’s music.
