For the past three years, Father John Misty has performed a Big Sur Park School Benefit at Sunset Cultural Center in Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA. In the past, he’s uploaded the live shows to Bandcamp by each Christmas. The annual (((folkYEAH!)) event took place this past Thursday and Friday. The sets were mostly the same except for the switch of one song during the main performance (on Thursday he played “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings” and swapped it for “Tee Pees 1-12” on Friday) and slightly different encores. Thursday’s encore included two new songs, and on Friday he performed “Leaving LA” for the first time since 2019.
Each night opened with the Jason Crosby trio performing Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas. Each set also included six covers: Dory Previn’s “The Lady With The Braid,” Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s “I See A Darkness,” Gillian Welch’s “April The 14th, Part 1,” The Who’s “Blue, Red And Grey,” Neil Young’s “Ambulance Blues,” and the Magnetic Fields’ “Epitaph For My Heart.” Aside from the Dory Previn song, the rest of these covers seem to be new to his live set.
Two new songs were played on piano as an encore on the first night. One was about his daughter being a Beatlemaniac and having to learn of John Lennon and George Harrison’s deaths and the second “about billionaires buying coastline property,” according to setlist.fm On Night 2, he did that new Beatles-referencing song again along along with Pure Comedy‘s “Leaving LA” for the first time in over six years plus Fear Fun‘s “I’m Writing A Novel.”
Check out some clips and the setlist from night one (which doesn’t list the encores) below.
