David Kushner at Varsity Theater

“Is this where the parents sit?”

It was a fair question. I was in the upper level of Varsity Theater, sitting on one of the comfortable sofas when a woman sat down next to me with a beer in hand. She was from Bismarck, ND, she drove her teenage daughter and some of her daughter’s friends to the Minneapolis show.

She wasn’t the only one to make a long distance commitment. Outside I met a mother from Duluth, MN and inside a grandmother from Madison, SD. The reason for the chaperones was the average makeup of the audience member was a teenage girl.

“I get it,” said the mother from Duluth. For her it was The New Kids on the Block. For her daughter it wasn’t a boyband with slick dance moves. It was two singer/songwriters with introspective lyrics wrapped in soulful, gospel-tinged music.

Chance Peña opened up the sold-out show. A Tyler, TX, native, he burst onto the music scene in 2015 by making coach Adam Levine’s team on season nine of The Voice as a 15-year-old prodigy. In 2020 he helped co-write John Legend’s “Conversations in the Dark” which was the lead single to the Grammy winning album Bigger Love.

He released his first EP this summer, Lovers to Strangers and played the four songs from the EP along with unreleased songs like “Cruel World,” “Thaw” and “Love You Right” which he said he wrote in three minutes with his roommate and right-hand man on stage, Wes.

Peña finished the set with two really nice songs: “I’m Not Who I Was” and “In My Room” which he wrote in his room in his parents home, which captures a moment in time that isn’t sad or pensive but fleeting.

David Kushner is having a moment right now. One that involves being strapped to a rocket of a hit single “Daylight” and launching into the stratosphere of fandom.

Just to enter the Varsity Theater involved getting in a line that almost circumvented the Dinkytown block. The mood of the young crowd inside was palpable as they sang along to d4vd’s “Here With Me” while the stage was being set. And when it was go time, the screaming was on a level that I have never quite experienced. It was loud, it was sustained and it was louder than the actual music.

Like Peña, Kushner’s music is thoughtful, quiet and subtle and throughout the set the crowd sang along to the lyrics if they weren’t screaming at the top of their lungs. And when Kushner said the first song he wrote “Miserable Man” was also his personal favorite, the crowd completely lost it.

It was certainly a dichotomous moment: introspective songs about death “Cigarettes” and Alzheimer’s “Mr. Forgettable” met with applause usually reserved for a K-Pop band. But I think Kushner has an understanding for the incongruity as he told Poptized:

Yeah, so like in a way that music makes me feel alive and in a way I think that’s why a lot of people relate to my music, because it makes them weirdly feel alive in a strange way that really helps them connect to me and my music and what I have to say.