VICTORIA MARTINEZ
Senior News Editor

Danny Michel is standing by the window of a gorgeous, gorgeous house.

“How do I get talked into these things?” he asks the assembled crowd, who are seated in the living room of the same fabulous home. (It had an elevator, which Michel rode “like seven times,” for the novelty factor).

It’s an odd concert.

This show, part of The Neighbor’s Dog TV series, is, like all of their shows, set up in the extreme of intimate environments, someone’s volunteered home. Michel, who’s been on tour since Sept. 9, had never played in a house before. Of his song devoted to his older self, Old Man Dan, he said, “I never play this one, it’s too weird. But I’m playing in someone’s house,” he paused. “So it’s weird.”

Michel plays about half of his shows with a full band, but this show, due to the constraints of playing in a living room, was not one of those shows. Michel was his own backup band and used a loop sampler to pull it off. Because this was a show for broadcast, of course, the loop sampler failed the first time he tried to use it. Dead silence.

The unique setting lent itself to that sort of quirk, thankfully, and thanks to Michel’s personable nature, as he could communicate with the small crowd with strange small jokes. He’d get distracted by his image broadcast on the flatscreen TV to his right and make faces, like someone encountering webcam for the first time.

The set featured songs from his newest album, Sunset Sea, which was written during a trip to Belize, as well as old classics including a riveting take on “White Lightning.”

Despite the weirdness, he earned an encore and performed a cell phone-sound finale, which could only have happened here, in a room overlooking the Traffic Bridge and downtown, with 50 people intimately seated in a living room.