By advertising on her MySpace page she helped to promote her 21-day virtual “tour” and managed to gather a staggering 70,000 internet viewers from all over the world, including several record labels. At the end of that three weeks, Sandi closed a recording contract with Sony’s RCA, a deal stated by the company as "the first web cast signing in major record label history".
Fortunately, the flowerily punk rocker does not only have talent for business, but also for music. As a child, Sandi played keyboard and wrote songs, as a young teenager she was part of a cover band, and while attending the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts she was part of the school’s choir. Now she’s in the USA -for her live tour- to promote her first album “Smile…It Confuses People”, just released in the UK this past June.
Sandi arrived at Schubas’ front door for a late Wednesday night concert right after Joe Cassidy, lead singer of the local Chicago band Assassins, finished his beautiful acoustic performance. A barefoot Sandi Thom started her show by asking her supportive audience (which seemed to be comprised by family and friends -their accent said it all) to please step up and come close to the stage.
The charismatic singer did a great job in leveraging the intimate venue to engage the audience throughout her performance by introducing each song. Even though Sandi has a very strong and expressive voice when singing, she sounded a bit rough while interacting with the crowd in between the setlist: “Sorry I may sound like Joe Cocker”, she joked in regards to being slightly under the weather. Her performance was backed-up by a band member playing a “cajon” as percussion instrument, a wooden box typically used in flamenco songs, and a second acoustic guitar player who looked so relaxed as if he was performing at some Brazilian beach in a summer afternoon.
It was a pleasantly mellow show with tunes that varied between folksy and country music, which at times reminded me a lot of Sheryl Crow, but also a little bit of Tracy Chapman and perhaps even Janis Joplin at times (but that may have been helped by her sore throat).
Maybe today’s record shops are not on top anymore and the vinyl that they stocked have since followed the path of the dinosaur, but lets be real, for someone whose stardom was incredibly accelerated thanks to one of the most powerful inventions of our lifetime, I just really can’t believe Sandi Thom would rather be living in 1977 or even 1969.
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