Mark Eitzel – Whelans – Live Review – 26/03/25
by Killian Laher

Whelans was busy for Mark Eitzel’s first visit to Dublin in eight years.  With his most successful material now well in the rearview mirror, this time around, there was no album to promote or merchandise of any description.  Support came from Gerard Hough, who played a set of long, drawn-out acoustic songs.  Despite the length of songs such as No Men Wanted Here and The Wild and the Windswept Sea, Hough’s throaty vocals carried them with a weary charm.

Mark Eitzel arrived having had 3 hours sleep apparently, and still in the same ‘stinky shirt’ due to lost luggage.  Playing a mixture of new songs, plus some solo and American Music Club favourites (“songs that I wrote by myself”), in between songs he entertained the crowd with anecdotes about his cab driver, references to the state of America, how he hates his guitar, and how Whelans treated him like a king…. “but where’s my children’s choir?”.  Without a band and accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, he was in fine voice, bellowing out the bluesy, newer songs while occasionally interrupting himself when he occasionally missed a guitar chord, spending a minute or two attempting to perfect the right chord change.

Long-term fans weren’t disappointed as he played Mission Rock Resort and American Music Club favourites Firefly, Why Won’t You Stay and Western Sky amongst others, mixing comic treatment (the singer mimicking the previously-referenced children’s choir) with heartfelt renditions of the songs.  Newer songs were given a chance to breathe in this stripped-down format, with Nothing and Everything (at the second attempt) standing out, featuring Eitzel’s excellent guitar-picking.  Some of the audience were a little over-enthusiastic between songs, but their shouts of “you’re a legend” received the retort from the performer “that just means I’m old”.

After an uneasy Patriot’s Heart, the final song of the night was dedicated to his late mother, a lump-in-the-throat inducing version of Blue and Grey Shirt.  Undoubtedly, Mark Eitzel is a bit much for some people, too real and unvarnished for the casual fans.  But as self-hating, self-deprecating songwriters go, he is still one of the best around.  Not quite “tired of being a spokesman for every tired thing”, to paraphrase the closing song.  The happy audience was sent away, many feverishly planning a trip to his show in Kilkenny on Thursday night.