If you are a music fan, you surely will not have been able to escape singer-songwriter David Kushner and his hit song ‘Daylight’ which has garnered over 1 billion streams on Spotify. The singer, who was born in Chicago but moved to Los Angeles to pursue music, released his debut album in the summer of 2024. He also announced he would be bringing his ‘The Dichotomy Tour’, named after this album, to Europe and the UK. On February 27th, Kushner played his second headline show in Amsterdam’s Paradiso, after having already played there the night before too.
The doors to this beautiful venue – which is a converted church – opened at 19:00 to let 1500 eager fans into the main hall. The audience only had to wait about half an hour before support act Jenna Raine took to the stage. With her, she brought two band members: a keyboardist who also served as guitarist, and a bassist. Raine opened her set with the song ‘Cruise Control’, followed by ‘Crickets’ and her latest single, ‘21’. She wrote this track about being terrified of growing up, “like every girl that’s ever been alive”. A very relatable track indeed and one that her many fans in the crowd definitely seemed to love. A fan at the front held up a little sign on her phone that said “We love you Jenna!” which made the singer visibly happy.
After the third song, Raine gave a shout-out to Kushner for bringing her on this tour. This was only her second show – as she only joined the tour from Amsterdam onwards – but she absolutely smashed it from the start. She and Kushner have been friends for a long time and she dedicated her next song to their friendship. ‘Nights Like These’ Raine sang while sitting at her own keyboard. Next on the setlist was the catchy, easy-to-sing-along banger ‘It Is What It Is’. At the end of the track, Raine told the crowd they would be doing a little singing competition, splitting the audience down the middle to see whether the left or the right side could sing these lyrics louder. It was a short but sweet little moment before Raine moved on to introduce her next song. An unreleased track, Raine wrote ‘Donnie’s World’ about a homeless man she met in London who she had an enlightening conversation with. She played this track on the guitar, with the crowd lighting up the entire room with their phones’ flashlights.
It was then time for the final two songs of Raine’s set. She played ‘see you later (ten years)’ which as she said was part of a challenge she set for herself to write a hundred songs in one year. As stated by Raine herself, this was song number 45. She started on the keyboard – and had to reset the song a few seconds in because she was laughing too hard – and then moved away from the keyboard halfway through to be able to move around the stage. Finally, she played her track ‘Roses’. It took a minute for her to be able to start with that one, as many fans held up signs for her and someone even got her a little bouquet of flowers (which were, in fact, not roses). Raine’s set took a total of thirty minutes and she was such a lovely performer, interacting with the audience as much as possible and treating them to her adorable voice.
At 20:30, the music playing over the speakers turned off again to make room for the voice-over intro to David Kushner’s own set. “I’m ready for the daylight but sometimes it feels so far away”, but “even in the darkest moments, a light will come” were some of the sentences that could be heard. A beautiful introduction to Kushner’s body of work, whose music is often sad but heartwarming at the same time. During the introduction, Kushner’s band – consisting of guitarist Scott Goldbaum, keyboardist Anne Williamson and drummer Bruno Lamas – came on stage, and after the voice-over ended, the man himself joined them to open his set with ‘Darkerside’ and ‘Humankind’. After playing these first two songs, he mentioned how this was his second night playing the venue before introducing the song ‘Poison’. It must be noted how much Kushner’s live vocals sound like the studio versions of his songs; an impressive feat considering how his tracks make use of both very low as well as very high notes.
Kushner then told the crowd how he grew up writing songs in his parents’ garage and never went to college, in order to start his music career instead. He talked about the fear of the unknown, about not knowing if such decisions would turn out to be the correct ones, about which he wrote ‘Sweet Oblivion’. At the end of this track, he motioned for the crowd to clap along to the beat. As mentioned earlier, many of Kushner’s tracks are hopeful but also quite sad. The same goes for his song ‘Mr. Forgettable’. He asked the audience if they had someone in their lives who is “a piece of your soul”; Kushner wrote this track about his grandfather who suffered from Alzheimer’s. It’s a beautifully haunting song to which the crowd eagerly sang and cried along. He performed the track on the guitar, asking the audience to sing the final chorus loudly. Kushner also played the next track, ‘Dead Man’, on the guitar – making way for a little guitar solo in the bridge.
So far, Kushner had been wearing a long, black trench coat over his outfit, which he took off before playing ‘No High’ and ‘Burn’. Surely, it was much too warm to perform the entire set in such a heavy coat, and the audience definitely did not complain when he showed up in just a tank top. Ninth on the setlist was ‘Heaven Sees’, which as a track has some of the best instrumentals in Kushner’s entire discography, and this was performed amazingly by his band. Afterwards, Kushner talked to the audience about how growing up, his parents did not necessarily have the best relationship. This led to a lot of trauma about which he wrote his most recent EP 20 Years from Now. He had decided to add just one song from it to his setlist: ‘Love Worth Saving’, the opening track. He then continued with ‘Cigarettes’, which he played on the guitar to a flashlight-waving audience, and ‘Skin and Bones’. “Wrap me in your skin and bones, Amsterdam” he sang to loud cheers.
Finally, Kushner moved to the last few songs on the setlist, which were ‘Buried at Sea’, ‘You and Me’ and ‘Miserable Man’. He had left the stage for a second before this fifteenth song to get his guitar out again and during this short interlude, fans could be heard screaming “I love you” to the singer. “I love you” he immediately shouted back before playing the song, asking the audience to sing the final chorus. Of course, this was not actually the final song – the encore existed, obviously, of ‘Daylight’ – to which the fans sang along hardest of the entire night. While the set only lasted an hour, and Kushner could have probably filled some more time with other songs from his discography, it was perfect to end it on this note.
