All right, Admissions Office, you can stop trying to recruit people. Your job is done. Christopher Owens has us covered.
As you well remember, former-member-of-the-band-Girls-and-current-solo-artist Christopher Owens romanced a full-capacity audience at Memorial Chapel last Thursday, playing the entirety of his solo debut/mini-rock opera Lysandre as well as a handful of cover songs. The concert itself was extremely enjoyable, including the opening set by Mara Connor (Wes/Vassar ’13), though nobody could be quite certain what Owens himself thought about the concert, or the audience or atmosphere or mood or time of day— his sub-hour-long performance was incredibly short on stage banter, by which I mean he said “thank you” and nothing else.
Which was fine. His Cali-beach-rock sound and golden-haired-god image work well with a strong-but-silent attitude. The music spoke enough for the both of them.
In a video diary poignantly titled “january tour 2013,” however, Owens makes up for his lack of interaction and stage-side manner by, well, not actually talking. He spends over 6 and a half minutes showing clips from his various tour stops, and lo-and-behold at the 3:45 mark, there’s Wesleyan! Sort of.
We see a band member and (who I think is his) stage manager in one of the piano rooms below Memorial Chapel. The weird wall-couch and oddly colored walls in the background are unmistakable, and if you look close (computer: enhance!) you can even make out a framed poster for one of Wesleyan’s ensembles. Stay with me, because this is journalism of the highest caliber. After watching his stage manager do odd things with his hands, Owens cuts to a shot of the stained glass in the actual Chapel, panning over to see his crew setting up the stage for their performance that night.
After that, we get a few seconds of the stage manager noodling around on what I’m guessing is one of Memorial Chapel’s downstairs organs (because let’s be honest, where else in Owens’ tour is he going to find so many organs at his disposal?) All in all, it’s a solid 45 seconds of exposure. We should be grateful for every last bit of it — even if the school or venue isn’t mentioned by name, and unless you go here or know the facilities, you’d never know it was Wesleyan. But still. Some publicity is better than no publicity, amiright?
Owens is known for documenting his month-to-month tour life, and his Youtube page is filled with soundtracked-but-not-narrated videos like this one. So we should feel privileged to be seen as a significant enough part of his life to be included.
Not totally convinced? Yeah, me neither. But hey, at least the concert was worth it. Here’s a reminder of what it looked like:
