Day gives retro feel to catchy jazz style
Singer-songwriter Spencer Day is out of time — not in the “sands through the hourglass” sense, but rather like he’s a visitor from another era. It’s almost as if Mel Torme and Andy Williams time-traveled from the 1950s, dropped by Elton John and Billy Joel in the 1970s to borrow some of their piano-man mojo, then landed in the lanky form of Day.
With his throaty baritone, Day — a former San Franciscan who splits his time between Los Angeles and New York — is a champagne crooner who knows how to write catchy, jazzy songs that feature his goofy sense of humor as well as his attraction to the darker side of life and love. On Friday, Aug. 24, in the first of his two cabaret shows at Feinstein’s at the Nikko in San Francisco, he spent more than 90 minutes proving how, in his words, he’s “the gayer John Mayer and the less iconic Harry Connick.”
Even beyond his smooth vocals and quirky patter, Day’s set highlights just what an accomplished songwriter he has become. The songs from his seventh and most fully realized album, “Angel City,” are all about L.A., and they’re fantastic, full of shadow and light, Tinseltown cliche and crushed dream weariness. The winsome “Ghost of the Chateau Marmont” rhymes “Babylon” and “Marmont,” while the seemingly cheerful “72 and Sunny” is really about clinical depression. The almost funky (and entirely irresistible) “I Got Love (Gold Digger)” pretends
to prefer love over famous labels, while “The California Yes” is all about saying no.
While the California suite was superb, Day offered his most sincere and unadorned vocal performance of the evening on “Somewhere on the Other Side,” an absolutely stunning ballad, inspired by a deported Mexican immigrant. Accompanying himself on the piano, with John Storie joining in on guitar, the song has a hymn-like gravity that builds to a stirring sense of hope.
Elsewhere, Day was in a lighter mood. With the superb Storie, along with bassist Daniel Fabricant and drummer Jason Slota, he had fun melding “South of the Border” with “Perdido” before telling a story from his youth involving a crush on a Mexican exchange student. His ode to that time was a surprisingly effective version of Abba’s “Fernando” in Spanish.
Rather than offering the usual dip into the Great American Songbook, Day resurrected the ’50s, an era when, he acknowledged, he probably would have been a big star, with a medley of “Mr. Sandman,” “Dream Lover” and “Dream.” His reinterpreted “oldie” was the Cardigans’ mid-’90s hit “Lovefool,” and his comic highlight, after a long exploration of co-dependent love songs (“You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You” and so on) was another new song, this one with the primary lyric, “There’s nothing better than love when you’re stupid and young.”
Day is certainly neither stupid nor young. At 40, he is not the same singer San Franciscans got to know at places like Mecca and the Plush Room, but he’s clearly loving what he’s doing. With a focus on his increasingly sharp original material, he’s keeping cabaret fresh with a retro charm all his own.