Tyrant Studios in Vancouver does not announce itself so much as reveal itself in layers. You walk in thinking you are going to play a room, and then Daniel, musican/ booker/ soon-to-be-father begins to peel back the past as if it were part of the set list. He told us about the hidden bar. Actual. A bar inside what used to be a strip club, tucked upstairs away in the architecture like a secret chord. At some point, it hosted members of the Rat Pack. Sinatra-adjacent ghosts, Sammy Davis Jr. laughter lingering in the walls. The piano sat in the room like it knew all of this already. A beautiful and very funky grand. The kind of instrument that has lived a life and is not embarrassed by it. The keys had a bit of warp, each note feels like it has a personality instead of a job. Makes you play differently and that’s before noticing other great musicians in the audience. Leah, Ida, Mark. Familiar faces that make a city feel less like a stop and more like a continuation. Towne Island-Joseph Wolinsky Barry, introduced me with that particular mix of affection and mild sabotage that only comedians master. You never quite know whether you’ve been elevated or undermined, probably the right emotional state before performing.

Someone warned me about a community radio guy. “You should avoid him,” they said, in the tone usually reserved for weather systems or minor illnesses. I met him. He was, in fact, peculiar, but no more than any other peculiar radio person. It’s a professional requirement. He asked questions that circled the point rather than landing on it, which is, in its own way, a kind of artistry. Then there was the woman who looked about thirty but was, I later learned, in her mid-fifties. She spoke to me with a warmth of an old friend who knew me or at least a version of me assembled from songs, posts, assumptions, maybe a few lines taken a little too literally. She assumed we share the same views, the same conclusions, the same private map of the world. I didn’t correct her right away. It felt like interrupting a dream. Later, it became clear that I was not the person she constructed, something shifted, like a note that doesn’t quite resolve the way you expected. She was polite, but you could feel imaginary Bob had been easier to agree with.

The show itself unfolded inside all of this. The history of the room, the piano’s quiet authority, friends in the audience, ghosts in the walls, expectations drifting in and out of focus. It’s never just the music. It’s the accumulation of all and everything pressing gently against each note. At some point you realize every room is like that hidden bar Daniel described. Always another layer behind the one you think you’re playing in. Old stories. Old versions of people. Old assumptions. You sit at the piano, press a key, and try to make something true enough to hold all of it for a few minutes.