The Violent Femmes turned The Lyric Baltimore into a communal sing-along on Oct. 5, delivering a brisk, hit-stacked “evening with” set that doubled as a love letter to folk-punk’s scrappy core.
Steve Satzberg was there to photograph the show!
ChatGPT produced the following article to accompany original photographs by Steve Satzberg.
With no opener and the house full, Gordon Gano walked on with that familiar, sly half-smile, his acoustic cutting clean lines while Brian Ritchie’s giant acoustic bass thumped like a heartbeat through the room. Drummer John Sparrow kept everything taut with his stand-up snare-and–Weber-grill attack, a percussive signature that fits the band’s junk-shop minimalism and still feels delightfully subversive in a plush theater.
Early, they uncorked the holy trinity: “Blister in the Sun,” “Kiss Off,” and “Please Do Not Go,” and the balcony crowd stood as one — counting out the “one, one, one…” as if the song had been bottled yesterday. The setlist zig-zagged through eras with “Country Death Song,” “Waiting for the Bus,” and the gospel-tinged “Jesus Walking on the Water,” before easing into the tender “Good Feeling,” where Gano’s violin and hushed vocal turned the Lyric pin-drop quiet.
Stream the 40th anniversary remaster of “Good Feeling” by Violent Femmes on YouTube:
The back half stretched out and got weird in all the right Femmes ways. “Dance Motherfucker Dance” snapped with punk-skiffle bite; “I Held Her in My Arms” and “Color Me Once” showed the band’s deep catalog has teeth beyond the radio staples; and “Black Girls” ballooned into joyful chaos thanks to Blaise Garza’s low-end sax artillery, evoking the Femmes’ long-running “Horns of Dilemma” spirit even without a full horn mob onstage.
They closed the main set with a one-two built for catharsis: “Gone Daddy Gone” into “Add It Up,” the latter detonating as the entire room yelled the immortal question right back at Gano. It felt less like nostalgia and more like proof that these songs — spare, nervy, and emotionally guileless — still map cleanly onto 2025 attention spans.
Across 90-ish minutes, the Femmes were economical but generous: no pyrotechnics, no video walls — just four musicians trusting dynamics, sing-along muscle memory, and the strange alchemy they invented four decades ago. If you came to hear the classics, you left hoarse and happy; if you came to be reminded how much groove you can wring from acoustic instruments and a barbecue lid, you left newly converted. Either way, “American Music” didn’t even need an encore to echo in the aisles on the way out.
Here are some photos of the Violent Femmes performing live at The Lyric Baltimore on Oct. 5, 2025. All pictures copyright and courtesy of Steve Satzberg.
