Pete Yorn Makes the Years Melt Away at Sold-Out Kessler Theater

“All right — what do you guys wanna hear?”

Pete Yorn’s simple query unleashed a cacophony of voices inside the sold-out Kessler Theater Monday night, a blizzard of song titles hurled at the man who wrote them.

To that point in the evening, the capacity crowd had been reverently silent as the 50-year-old singer-songwriter, making his first Dallas appearance in six years, worked his way through his catalog.

It was faintly ironic that he met his invitation for requests with a brief medley of 1980s alt-rock: Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Love and Rockets and Suede (he’d dusted off a lo-fi rendition of Howard Jones’s “No One is to Blame” earlier in the night).

Still, he acquiesced, indulging the crowd in a satisfying one-two punch of “Sense” and “Murray,” both of which elicited gleeful cheers from those seated and standing, many often dancing in place and singing along audibly enough to nearly drown out the man of the hour.

Armed with a pair of acoustic guitars (one of which, Yorn informed us early on was a rental procured locally; he’d met with some unfortunate high winds in Illinois, which damaged his other, preferred instrument) and a harmonica, clad simply in a trucker cap, T-shirt, and jeans, with tightly laced Doc Martens boots on his feet, Yorn made the years melt away.

“It’s been too long,” Yorn said by way of introduction. “Something happened, and I went into hiding a little bit. We’re gonna have a good time tonight, I promise you.”

The New Jersey native’s pleasantly scuffed baritone voice has scarcely aged since his 2001 debut, musicforthemorningafter. His 105-minute turn on the Kessler stage, the site of his previous stop in town, was as he advertised at the top: “I’ve got some tunes; I’ve got some stories.”

The line between them was blurred early and often, as Yorn would begin a song, sing a line, and stop himself, a memory or observation flooding in and momentarily derailing him. While such stop-start momentum might be aggravating in a different setting, Monday’s set — peppered with staples like “Closet,” “Life on a Chain” and “Turn of the Century” — was conducted in such intimacy the asides felt like intruding on a private rehearsal.

“Such a great room,” Yorn said of the Kessler Theater. “Such a great place.”

Indeed, Yorn’s discursive approach proved disarming, a shaggy-dog set which meandered between albums and moments and moods, the throughline of it all Yorn’s earnest banter: “The cool thing about songs is they take you to a place … it’s so important. I never regret listening to music … playing my own songs I haven’t played in a while, triggers all these memories.”

Wrestling with love’s thorny tendencies, paying loving tribute to relatives, and indulging the visceral emotional reactions of the audience (a woman named Laura called out that Yorn “was everything” to her during her time in college 25 years ago), Yorn navigated all of it with an equable cool.

Given his even-keeled yet freewheeling approach, he made a poignant turn in the encore, alluding once more to his relatively newfound sobriety and the positive ripple effects of that choice.

“I talked about not drinking,” Yorn said as he picked at his acoustic guitar. “It made me think … I needed it to get on stage. I needed it to get on a plane. It was a slow thing, over the years. That song just now [‘The Man’] made me think I’m free and I feel good. … The point is: It feels good to be free. I wish that for all of you.”

His soliloquy led into “Golden Dream,” a tune he said he realized after the fact was unwittingly written for his father, who died two years ago. Then, the evening’s final song: “For Nancy,” from his debut album, and a song Yorn said has “saved me many times.”

The passionate, thrilling sound of the rapturous crowd singing back every syllable to Yorn gave you the sense the song, like so many others heard Monday, had that effect for many more individuals than the man in the spotlight.

See more photos from Monday's show: