Dani Kardon Plays Alberta Street Pub with Sweet Sophie Oblivion & Counterfeit Kubrick
Dani Kardon was visiting Portland, just for the week. She had moved down to L.A. two years ago to pursue music full-time, and I hadn’t seen her since just before she left town in the midst of that first pandemic summer. But we’d grown up down the street from one another; when we were six, she broke her arm in my backyard after a hard fall from the monkey bars. Her arm healed, we grew apart, until eight years later when we both showed up in the same small English classroom of our tiny downtown high school.
Then, last week, I picked her up and we drove to some hip, vegan bar in Southeast. Dani ordered a martini.
“A martini? Wow,” I said, “you’re so much more sophisticated than I am.”
“Well,” Dani took a dainty sip from her glass, “I was just hoping I’d impress you.”
Dani has always been impressive—even immediately on that first day of high school, the way she introduced herself to the class with such natural nonchalance while I gnawed at my fingernails, awaiting my turn to speak.
More impressive, still, when I heard her sing for the first time one month later on our so-called “Freshmen Retreat” to the Oregon Coast. It was dark, and we sat in the sand around a bonfire. During a rare lull between the Ingrid Michaelson and Paramore ukulele renditions, Dani borrowed an acoustic and strummed Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.” The two of us sang the words together, stumbling through the bridge, but sticking the landing. I was in awe of the richness and strength of her voice, how smooth each note sounded coming out of her mouth, even through the second chorus where Jeff Magnum sings, “In the arms of all I’m keeping here with meeee-eeee-eeee-eeee-eee… eee-eee-eee-EEE-ee-EEEE-eee.”
Two days after Dani and I went out, I pulled up an hour early to her show at the Alberta Street Pub. That night, she was sharing the stage with Sophie Shely and Ethan Conrad, a.k.a. Sweet Sophie Oblivion and Counterfeit Kubrick on Spotify. The three of them were old School of Rock friends; it had been five years since they had last played a show together.
In that time, they have all gone in very different directions musically, but each has maintained the technical talent first developed at their shared institution.
Shely opened the show. Just before she went on, I asked her how she was feeling.
“I’m so fucking nervous,” she said. “This is my first solo set ever.”
It was not the answer I was expecting from the multi-instrumentalist, Berklee College of Music graduate, who—not to mention—just released her first LP, Limbo Unlimited, on August 5, 2022. No surprise, the performance she gave did not reflect what she had divulged to me.
Clad all in black under purple lights, Shely’s shoegaze guitar and ethereal vocals conjured up a hair-raising atmosphere; a high-above-the-clouds, staring-down-the-side-of-a-cliff kind of feeling. To single-handedly evoke this feeling from an audience, without the help of the heavenly harmonies and dissonant synths recorded on the original tracks, is an impressive feat.
Dani followed, opening her acoustic set with an ode to New Orleans. The aptly titled “South Song” is beautifully drowsy. The bluesy, plucked chords are accompanied by Dani’s sultry vocals, which have always reminded me of Amy Winehouse. Her lyrics are chalk-full of rose-tinted imagery, made melancholic by the refrain, “You’re searching for something you may never find, which, by the end of the song, becomes, You’re searching for something you already left behind / but it’s okay, ‘cuz you’re okay / under the pale crescent moon light.”
Her narrative-driven lyrics bring the audience through vivid scenes of threadbare-tears in “All Good,” garden homes in “Bug Thief,” and lingering goodbyes in “No But Um.”
Nearing the end of her set, she performs the simply-titled, palpably heartbreaking, “New Love Song,” which opens with the lines, “It’s a young person’s game / running out the clock / burning all the bridges, ports, and docks. In the chorus, she sings, “It’s priceless but I’m willing to gamble / a privilege to end up in shambles / over you.” The emotional power of her voice is devastating as she confesses a futile yearning for a difficult past lover, to whom she wonders, “Will you still feel the same when I’m just a speck? / A weeping apparition with a face that you forget.”
Several nights after the show, over one last drink, Dani and I oscillate between talking about long-forgotten high school friends, and the new horror-comedy we’ve just gone to see together at Portland’s favorite indie movie theater. I was to fly to San Diego the following morning, and by the time I’d be back in town, Dani would have already returned to L.A.
She had good things ahead of her—a Phoebe Bridgers concert at Edgefield; an upcoming performance at West Hollywood’s famous Viper Room; a blossoming career as a singer-songwriter. Still, we were both sad when the night had to come to an end. We agreed not to let another two years pass before we got together again.
K E E P U P W I T H
