Curtain Call in Cambridge: The Honesty of Mike Kinsella

Mike Kinsella never intended to get that drunk. Dressed in the appropriate hipster-dad apparel of flannel shirt, dark, tight jeans and clean black-and-white checkered Vans, he walked on stage at the Middle East nightclub in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his guitar in its case over his shoulder. He sat on the lone chair and placed his guitar on his lap, strings dangling off the end of the neck in a twisted mess. He reached for the microphone, and adjusted it the best he could. The smell of vomit permeates from it. He really wasn’t interested in performing that night. The show was sold out, with roughly fifty people fitting into the small black box theater. They wanted to hear Kinsella sing songs he wrote ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago. But because of the microphone or the drinks he had before the show or the tiredness from three long nights on a short sojourn from his family, he wasn’t in the mood. He forgot words to songs, at one point stopping mid-song to ask the crowd for the lyrics and then argued about it with someone. Eventually, someone looked them up on the Internet and checked him.

It was the final stop on one of Kinsella’s short tours, long weekends performing, which he looks forward to each month or so. He’s a stay-at-home dad, the phrase tattooed on his left thigh. As much as he loves it, time away from his family allows him to escape and do the one thing he’s really good at: perform and write heartfelt and meaningful songs. But at the tail-end of the three shows, sitting in the Cambridge nightclub, he was ready for home. Bass bumped through the floor and walls from the basement, where a hip-hop show was going on in the larger room below.

Kinsella struggled through the set, ambling and taking his time to tune his guitar. It was supposed to be a night with Owen, the name of his solo prodigious project he’s been recording under since graduating from college in 1999. It was supposed to be filled with Kinsella’s slow acoustic songs that straddle the line between art and coffeehouse, balancing on intricate guitar playing and clever word play all disguised behind Kinsella’s ability to turn a quiet, talking-singing voice into something both soft and biting. Instead, it was night with Mike Kinsella the personality.

One woman shouted out, “What’s your favorite color?”

He responded, “That’s cool, I have kids too.”

This was the Kinsella of urban legend. This was the man who I had heard supposedly played an entire set of Van Halen songs on drums. This was the musical madman with a passion to write songs but...