Set list and more thoughts on Sam Smith's concert

He played 16 songs in his first official Twin Cities concert.

January 25, 2015 at 9:42PM
(The Minnesota Star Tribune)
Sam Smith/ Star Tribune photo by Aaron Lavinsky
Sam Smith/ Star Tribune photo by Aaron Lavinsky (The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Even though he made his big splash on "Saturday Night Live" last year, Sam Smith demonstrated Saturday night in his Twin Cities debut that he's not quite ready for primetime in concert.

It's challenging to present a bigtime headline concert when you've got only one album of material. And at Roy Wilkins Auditorium, the British pop star delivered almost all the tracks on the deluxe version of his best-selling, Grammy-nominated"In the Lonely Hour" plus a dramatic cover of the standard "My Funny Valentine" and the one-dimensional "Together," a 2014 collaboration with the British electronic duo Disclosure and Nile Rodgers.

As my review pointed out, his repertoire suffers from sonic sameness because it's so heavy on ballads and mid-tempo tunes. Even his reading of "Latch," the Disclosure dance hit on which he was the featured singer, was more downtempo than the original.

Only Smith's own "Restart," sort of a disco lite number, was more energetic, though he did get the faithful to clap along to "Like I Can" and wave their arms in unison to the blockbuster "Stay with Me."

Smith made an obtuse reference to playing to only 20 people the first time in Minneapolis. That was actually a private performance last March at the Dakota Jazz Club for key employees of Target and Best Buy as well as radio programmers.

Here is what Smith performed on Saturday:

Life Support/ Together/ Leave Your Lover/ I'm Not the Only One/ I've Told You Now/ Nirvana/ Like I Can/ Restart/ Good Thing/ Lay Me Down/ My Funny Valentine/ La La La/ Money on My Mind ENCORE Latch/ Make It to Me/ Stay with Me

about the writer

about the writer

Jon Bream

Critic / Reporter

Jon Bream has been a music critic at the Star Tribune since 1975, making him the longest tenured pop critic at a U.S. daily newspaper. He has attended more than 8,000 concerts and written four books (on Prince, Led Zeppelin, Neil Diamond and Bob Dylan). Thus far, he has ignored readers’ suggestions that he take a music-appreciation class.

See Moreicon

More from Minnesota Star Tribune

See More
card image
J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE, ASSOCIATED PRESS/The Minnesota Star Tribune

The "winners" have all been Turkeys, no matter the honor's name.

In this photo taken Monday, March 6, 2017, in San Francisco, released confidential files by The University of California of a sexual misconduct case, like this one against UC Santa Cruz Latin Studies professor Hector Perla is shown. Perla was accused of raping a student during a wine-tasting outing in June 2015. Some of the files are so heavily redacted that on many pages no words are visible. Perla is one of 113 UC employees found to have violated the system's sexual misconduct policies in rece