Thin Lear.
Matt Nilsen, Thin Lear, David Wirsig, and Niagara Moon
Never Ending Books
March 14, 2025
There was a microphone set up, but Matt Nilsen dispensed with it, instead forgetting about the stage and standing on the floor right in front of the audience. He strummed his guitar a couple times, just to test the room.
“There’s no graceful way to do this except to just do it,” he said, and started his set. In doing so, he set the tone for an evening of music on Friday at Never Ending Books — featuring him, Thin Lear, David Wirsig, and Niagara Moon — that brought musicians and audience closer together, literally and figuratively.
“I’m going to play some old songs, play some new songs, and try to remember all the lyrics,” the Waterbury-based Nilsen said, unspooling a set of originals that began with wry, sharply observed lyrics about personal relationships and continued with a guitar style that combined strumming and fingerpicking in subtly surprising ways.
“I never know what to say, so I don’t say anything,” he said in between songs, evidence that the sly humor in his lyrics extended to his casual speech. “I’m working on an album — aren’t we all?” he added later. But his songwriting made clear how worth it the effort was, as just beneath the archness and self-awareness was a direct and often disarming emotional core.
“There’s no us and there’s no them / there’s just you and me,” he sang early in his set. The nod toward common humanity seemed to resonate more deeply than usual with the audience, perhaps a response to the onslaught of current events. At the end of one song, someone in the audience spoke out. “That was beautiful, man,” he said, an utterance as spontaneous as it was honest.
“My name is Thin Lear, but you don’t have to call me that,” said the N.J.-based singer-songwriter Matt Longo, who doled out a small anecdote that encapsulated the difficulties of being a working musician in the past few years. “I was supposed to have vinyl” for his current run of shows, he said, “but the company that was pressing it closed and didn’t tell anyone.” He was supposed to have had them for his first show in Brooklyn, but “that venue also closed” abruptly. “So this is a theme.”
Where Nilsen had kept his emotions a little muted, Longo let his own fly; in the transition from set to set, wryness was replaced by a flair for drama. Longo’s melodies turned sharp corners, propelled by more keening singing and percussive guitar. He spoke openly about the joys of family and friends and his struggles with depression, and extracted wisdom from both.
“I’m from Long Island — don’t hold it against me,” he said, to introduce a song that was about messing around with friends at the beach when he was a teenager. But this was no gauzy-eyed look into the past. “I think about those teenage moments a lot,” he said, and “wonder how helpful to me they are. I don’t think they are. This is about that feeling of unhelpful nostalgia.”
The same dive into complex emotions accompanied a song about his daughter. When he learned he was going to be a father, “I wrote this imagining the worst possible scenario,” which to him was not having the emotional capacity to love her as she deserved. It turned out he was worried about the wrong things. “I should have been worried about how to use a power drill to build a crib,” he said. “Loving her is easy.”
The New Haven-based David Wirsig, accompanied by singer and keyboardist Libby O’Neil, followed up with a set of anthemic originals that ramped up the drama even more. “I primarily write fiction,” Wirsig explained, and “really I should have written a novel, but I wrote an album instead.” With stirring chords, rousing melodies, some sparse but effective percussion, and deft keyboard work, Wirsig’s and O’Neil’s piercing voices offered up story after story of people on the brink, whether they were sharing forties and playing songs in a quarry, staging an intervention, or dying in a nuclear explosion.
In all his songs, Wirsig deployed the tried-and-true formula of setting the lyrics at odds with the music. The more sad and desperate the lyrics got, the more insistent and hopeful the music became. The result was a raw and deeply emotional set that Wirsig and perhaps some of the audience got lost in — even when it turned out a song Wirsig wrote years ago proved timely. As he introduced the song “Refugee,” “I wrote it in 2016 and I thought it would be irrelevant. Now I’m singing it in 2025 and it’s not.”
The Northampton, Mass.-based Niagara Moon — Thomas Erwin on vocals and keyboard and Huimin Wan on harmonies — finished out the evening with a set of songs that, after the escalating emotionality of the acts that preceded them, felt like a return. With very little banter in between songs, Erwin and Wan floated through originals about relationship difficulties in which the speakers never felt the need to lose themselves, instead understanding everything from a wise remove. With a sensibility that seemed as much pulled from musical theater as pop music, each song guided the listener through the singer’s troubles, while the music reassured of closure, of satisfying endings.
In one song, Erwin said, “life is marching on — there it goes!” with an air of regret and resignation, but also acknowledgement and acceptance. In another, he nodded toward “how easy life can be when it’s not trying to be so hard,” a fitting reminder that even the most fraught times probably won’t last forever.