This live performance and short documentary for singer-songwriter Tori Kelly and her album Inspired By True Events filmed in November 2019. During which Kelly spends the course of thirty minutes performing six songs off her then-upcoming album, with threads of short, 20-30 second bits of commentary to precede them.
Amongst the standout songs were, “Coffee” and “Sorry Would Go A Long Way”—the former being one of the most popular tracks from the album and a personal favorite of mine. Starting with Kelly on acoustic guitar and Asato on electric, the duo eases into the song with picked strings paired with soft vocals. But as the intensity of the story was built, so did the song’s dynamics, Kelly switching to full strumming rather than finger-picking strings. This partnered with a strong, solid vocal timbre made for a feeling of drastic longing and nostalgia as the story tells of missing a person so strongly that the singer begins to envy even the material things around that person. Even with such an emotive song, Kelly showcased her massive amount of control over her voice—which shone brightly over the simple guitar accompaniment.
Something that resided in my mind throughout the concert was the excellent use of texture. Doing an acoustic set like this helped to emphasize these strong thematic elements of vulnerability and openness that listeners do not get as much from the studio recordings. Not to say that the message behind these songs is lost through the digital album, but it was easy to devote attention to the lyrics and the most essential musical aspects when it was stripped down to the necessities. Combining the aforementioned audio elements with visual components like the warm lighting, comfortably carpeted room, and the select group of listeners served to bring together the, might I say, prosody of the event as a whole to convey something very personal.