Good times singer-songwriter playing at the Orpheum Stage Door (the show was moved from the now-shuttered Majestic Theater). As was to be expected, the room was full of adoring fans excitedly responding to his tunes.
A live concert video clip of Wertz performing "The Day Forever Died" at the Orpheum follows below, along with several others from the show.
Originally from Nashville, with roots in evangelical Christian youth culture, Wertz is a popular draw when he comes to town. When he opened for The Profit$ (now defunct) in September 2005, the main theater of the Orpheum was filled with legions of Profit$ fans, mostly college-age women. Madison music journalist Kiki Schueler attended that show, noting that the enthusiasm extended to Wertz as well. She wrote:
Opener Matt Wertz took the stage earlier that night to an overwhelming roar of applause. Slightly taken aback, "um, I'm not the Profit$," he explained, which was hardly necessary... In fact, many of the people up front for his acoustic set of confessional songs knew all the words and shouted requests, which he was more than happy to play (before "Counting to 100" he admitted that it wasn't next on the set list, but "when 40 screaming girls are asking for it, I've got to play it.").
This fervor doesn't seem to have diminished in the year and a half since that show. Many fans captured footage of Wertz's latest stop in Madison; in addition to the video above, there are two clips of his performance of "Heartbreaker" (here and here), one clip of "Like the Last Time" (here), another featuring "5:19" (here), and a final video (here) of "Everything's Right."
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