Sixpence None the Richer
The Church Studio
July 12, 2025
When Sixpence None the Richer went into a replicant performance of their nigh unavoidable 1998 song “Kiss Me” at the Church Studio last Saturday night, I felt a full-body flush of nostalgic joy, remembering the radio and all the other places this song spoke to us: the movie She’s All That, the soundtrack to Dawson’s Creek, and even a BBC broadcast of a royal wedding, if you’re into that sort of thing. I spent the late 1990s glued to pop radio, and whenever I hear even a whiff of any hit single of that era, my brain cells realign to my early teenage self. In my head, I can replay every instrumental solo and errant “yeah” or “whoa” from every hit song from that year.
It’s barely possible for a band to imbue itself into the DNA of the entire culture anymore, so it’s something special to recall a time when it was, and because of this, I absolutely understand the trend of ‘90s band reunions and reconsuming art that used to make you happy to see if it still does. I’m not the only one: “Kiss Me” went triple platinum in 2024, a year before K-Pop behemoth Lisa of Blackpink interpolated portions of the song for her single “Moonlit Floor.” As of writing, that song has 340 million streams on Spotify alone. Lisa was born in 1997. All this to say, I don’t reflexively have a “THAT band is still together?” reaction when I see someone coming through Oklahoma: Counting Crows will be here in August. Wilson Phillips will be at Hard Rock in September. Nelly is here all the time.
Even without all that context, I was excited to be offered the chance to review a Sixpence show, because I legitimately liked this band, the hits and also the entire self-titled album that housed “Kiss Me.” With its heavy orchestration and fairytale imagery, it was kind of a gentle, bookish (the band name is a C.S. Lewis reference) answer to alternative rock radio.
Sixpence tour opener Alex Wong played a brief acoustic set of earnest originals in the lobby an hour before the show as ticketholders filtered into the building, which was stiflingly hot in places. A pre-show email message warned about the loss of one of the building’s HVAC compressors the day prior, and most spaces outside of the Live Room, including the lobby, were (barely) cooled by fans. Wong sweated it out and won over a couple dozen people, who lingered in the entry and listened intently. The heat isn’t anyone’s fault but Oklahoma’s, and everyone seemed to handle it with good spirits figuratively and literally, in the form of a free glass of champagne handed to them at the door. It’s worth pointing out that the Church offered a $70 ticket level for a “lounge listening experience” where the buyer would be in the building for the show but not in the same room as the band. I do not know if anyone participated in this, or if the lounge was appropriately temperate.
Ticketholders could spend the pre-show minutes in the museum room with a catering table of small bites and music artifacts, and then a few minutes before showtime, Church staff and volunteers ushered us through the basement bar into the Live Room. Studio employees took the mic for a brief history lesson about the Studio, including that it’s now a 501(c)(3), and roped everyone into content creation, asking permission to take a cell phone video of the crowd and instructing people to kiss during “Kiss Me” so they could take more video later on.
Before starting the set, vocalist Leigh Nash warned the crowd that they are in fact a rock band and apologized for the volume to come. At one point later in the evening, she asked if anyone had spare earplugs because she noticed someone’s audial discomfort in the first few rows, dubbed the VIP seating. Even in the last row, the drumming was oppressively loud at times. The show was designed for much larger rooms (like OKC’s Tower Theatre, where Sixpence played the following night).
The band played a one-hour set at the Church, including their next two biggest singles, both covers—“There She Goes” (originally by The La’s, released in 1990) and Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over”—as well as a slew of beautiful new rock songs from a 2024 EP called Rosemary Hill. “Julia” is a particular standout, exemplifying the band’s songwriting practice of gut-punching couplets: “When they sent you to Chicago, you had high hopes / Thought your dad could pull it together,” it starts. I say rock songs, and I mean it in the way that maybe some people who haven’t listened to many of their songs expect them to be folk songs or even Christian rock, since this sort of was (is?) a Christian band, but these sounded written for the Telecaster and are meant to be amplified.
Nash, who was only in her early 20s when the band found success, is as strong a singer as ever in the same rounded, pleasing way as Nina Persson of the Cardigans or even, when she’s really pushing, Cyndi Lauper. She was a charming storyteller between songs, covering ground from where the band grew up to her Aaron Neville tattoo that accidentally “looks like Butthead” to the more recent death of her father, a good person who was also, she says, a hypochondriac and a menace, before launching into his favorite Sixpence song, 2002’s “A Million Parachutes.”
I enjoyed seeing the band’s continued chemistry with each other and Nash’s joy for performing, as well as their gratitude for the opportunity to continue their own legacy. Nash said, toward the end of the set, “I always wanted to be a singer and have songs on the radio, and what I got was so much cooler.”
I left the show with no musical complaints but had a few questions and quibbles with the logistics of it all. The house lights were on for the duration of the show, killing the intimate vibe I’d pictured. I knew the audio would be recorded on the Church’s historic console, but it was a surprise to me that there was also a five-camera video and photo shoot happening in a tightly packed room for the entirety of Sixpence’s set, obstructing views and, to me at least, detracting from the viewing and listening experience. I was seated just a few inches from a stationary tripod that people kept accidentally kicking while trying to maneuver the space. Ticket prices were arena-level, starting at $70 to be in a different room than the performance and going up to $300. Tickets for the band’s OKC show last weekend went as low as $5, for comparison. (This made me recall that after the change in ownership, the Church Studio posted a question in its Instagram Story, asking the public how much studio engineers should be paid, something I would hope they would know or at least not publicly crowdsource.) Maybe I’m the only person in the room who suffered from these details, but each idiosyncrasy took away from what was otherwise a lovely experience.
Still, I caught a heavy whiff of exclusivity being offered as a feature of this event as much as the band’s performance, from the free champagne and chicken wings (s/o to the caterer, great wings) to tiered entry times by ticket price. The Church’s owner has poured an enormous amount of her own money into the Studio and its surrounding buildings, speaking to the importance of renovation rather than destruction. I believe this is noble even if I question some of the artistic choices. I am glad someone cares about this piece of history, and I understand that legacy takes money to maintain, far more so for a nonprofit organization.
In the greater terrain of how I think about live music in Tulsa, though, I don’t know where or if this kind of event fits, and I can’t tell if it’s trying to be part of that loose collective. The Church does do a Tunes @ Noon series featuring local musicians that is free to members or with museum admission, as well as other more accessible concerts. Maybe the issue is that I have too much live local music experience and not enough money for this evening to feel like it was for me. To be honest, it’s fine if it wasn’t; I’m happy I went and had a good time. Sixpence None the Richer was a good band in the '90s, and they’re also a good band now. Legacy is cool, but it isn’t everything, and they’re still putting in the work.
