Pete Yorn’s Debut Album Turns 25
Pete Yorn – Music Hall of Williamsburg – June 8, 2026
In 2001, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and Shrek dominated the cinema box office. Sadly, we will never forget 9/11. The first iPod was released and reinvented how we listen to music on the go. R&B and rock dominated the music landscape with Pete Yorn’s debut long-player, Musicforthemorningafter, surging in the charts. Starting from his 1998 working debut, Thenightbefore, L.A. producer R. Walt Vincent encouraged Yorn to rework the album away from its alt-country roots and toward the use of digital recordings. Musicforthemorningafter remains an indelible marker of the early aughts soundtrack, and rightfully, the New Jersey native celebrated its 25th anniversary with a tour that landed at Music Hall of Williamsburg on Sunday night.
Donning a trucker hat, the singer-songwriter confessed that it was his first time playing Music Hall and opened his solo acoustic set with “All At Once,” from his 2003 sophomore album, Day I Forgot. He surprised fans with a cover of the Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” before getting down to the business of a 25th anniversary. The debut- album celebration felt much like an episode of VH1 Storytellers, in which Yorn told stories about the making of the songs on his seminal record, which he did not play in track order, but preferred a shuffled arrangement. Sharing how he recorded “Closet” in a studio that housed a black widow spider, many of the tracks were produced there. One not laid down in the “black widow,” “Simonize,” was tracked in the seedy midtown Times Square of the late ’90s.
The set was peppered with treats from a prelude of Coldplay’s “Yellow” into “Sense” to “On Your Side” paired with an interlude of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.” Recounting the story of signing with Columbia Records in 1999 (noting that the Knicks and Spurs were in the Finals playing each other then), Yorn played “Life on the Chain” for the A&R representative, Will Botwin, and was offered a deal on the spot. Closing the Musicforthemorningafter portion with his cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” he teased the cover with a snippet of Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drop Dead.”
Yorn’s engaging stories stretched his set more than two hours. They included an extensive encore of 2003’s “Crystal Village,” latest-single “All the Beauty,” from his forthcoming new album, “Elizabeth Taylor”off 2021’s Hawaii, and a cover mash-up of T. Rex’s “Children of the Revolution” with the Smiths’ “Shoplifters of the World Unite.” In the final moment, Yorn dedicated the last song, “Burrito,” from his sophomore album, to his late father. —Sharlene Chiu | @shar0ck
(Pete Yorn plays The Sinclair in Cambridge, Mass., on 9/10.)
Photos courtesy of Sachyn Mital | www.sachynmital.com
