Strip a song down to one voice and a piano and you find out fast whether it can stand on its own. Eric Hutchinson’s can — and on Thursday, June 18, he is testing them solo and acoustic at Buffalo Iron Works, the kind of room where you catch every aside and every off-the-cuff reach into a melody you thought you already knew.
About Eric Hutchinson
Hutchinson’s break was one of those stories that sounds invented. His debut, Sounds Like This, vaulted into the iTunes Top 10 in 2007 after Perez Hilton name-dropped it, peaked at number five, and bowed at number one on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart — the highest-charting album by an unsigned act in iTunes history at the time, before Warner Bros. picked it up. Hutchinson has spent the years since moving between piano pop, soul, folk, and Americana like he cannot pick a lane and has stopped trying.
He is touring behind Repeating Myself, his first new album in four years and, by his own framing, a deliberate return to the feel-good piano pop and singer-songwriter soul of that debut — think Billy Joel or Stevie Wonder filtered through his dry wit. The idea took shape while he was out celebrating the 15th anniversary of Sounds Like This. New tracks like the funk-leaning “King of Philadelphia” and the neo-Motown duet “Anything You Need” share the stage with the catalog fans show up for, all of it rebuilt for just him and the keys.
The Venue
Buffalo Iron Works sits at 49 Illinois Street in the Cobblestone District, a warm, brick-walled club that fits an acoustic set far better than a big room ever could. This one is 18+, with doors at 7:00 PM ahead of the 8:00 PM start — worth getting there early to claim a sightline before it fills in. Line up the rest of your calendar with more Western NY shows while you are planning the night.
Tickets & Pricing
Tickets run $25 in advance and $30 the day of the show, so the math rewards buying ahead. Grab yours before this one sells through.