My Favorite Concerts I Saw This Winter

Dear listeners,

Even during this long, often bitterly cold winter, I sometimes made it out of my apartment — please clap — to see live music. To commemorate this monumental human achievement, today I’m offering you a playlist of some of the best artists I’ve caught onstage so far this year.

They include a one-woman band with a flair for electronic wizardry (Time Wharp), a young poet turned songwriter with a gorgeously heavy-hearted voice (Mustafa) and a sharp satirist who knows exactly when to get unexpectedly sincere (Father John Misty). I intend for these occasional reports from live shows to become a new recurring Amplifier feature, so look out for more of them in the near future — once the weather turns temperate enough that I am compelled to leave my home even more frequently. Spring: Please hurry!

I spent a hundred bucks on gas, baby, let’s just have a good time,

Lindsay

Listen along while you read.

1. Father John Misty: “She Cleans Up”

Last Wednesday, the singer-songwriter Father John Misty played Manhattan’s storied Beacon Theater for the first time. Toward the end of the sold-out show, he told the crowd he wanted to commemorate the occasion with a tribute: “Here’s five minutes from Jerry Seinfeld’s set from his Beacon run last year.” Classic Father John Misty banter — and not true at all, since he immediately launched into another of his own wryly incisive tunes. FJM (whose real name is Joshua Tillman) certainly has a way with a Harry Nilsson-style ballad, as he demonstrated throughout the Beacon set, but one of my favorite moments of the night came when he played this verbose rocker from his latest album, the wide-ranging 2024 release “Mahashmashana.” Elaine Benes dance optional.

▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

2. Time Wharp: “Lupron”

It remains by far the most imaginative, technically impressive live cover I’ve seen so far this year: One late January night at Berlin, a small venue in the East Village, the experimental musician Kaye Loggins, who records as Time Wharp, used loop pedals and a distorted electric guitar to build a completely singular instrumental rendition of Joni Mitchell’s “Coyote.” You will, unfortunately, just have to take my word for it, since that seems to have been a one-off performance. But this luminous, hypnotic track from Time Wharp’s excellent 2022 album “Spiro World” gives a sense of Loggins’s style and her inventive virtuosity.