Review | beabadoobee’s Powerlines Tour

During the pandemic, I started getting into an artist whose music videos I thought were really cute and unique. I found out later that she and her then-boyfriend made them together, and ended up passing by her boyfriend cheerfully greeting fans as they exited her London show the next year. It was a really small show and short set, and tickets were only about 16 pounds. Later that year, I saw her play acoustic in a record store, where she broke down into tears about them breaking up. 

This year, I walked into The Kia Forum to see her perform. Rough Trade, the venue I had seen her in when I was abroad, has a capacity of 300. This show was sold out at over 15,000. 

beabadoobee (Beatrice Laus) is a Filipino-British singer-songwriter who first made a name for herself in the bedroom pop space. Evolving into more and more ’90s inspired rock sounds, beabadoobee hit the road to promote her latest project, Pylon, a record with an evolution of her sound that leans into a more grunge, rock, and midwest emo sound. 

At the beginning of her show, a red light beamed in the dark as a giant pylon appeared, with lines stretched over the crowd and across the stage. beabadoobee and her band walked onto the stage, made to look like an empty street. They started off the set with a song from Pylon, “Sun Has Set.” She then went immediately into older fan favorites “10:36” and “Apple Cider” — which elicited some excited cheers from fans next to me. She continued with some older hits like “Care,” “Coffee,” and “the perfect pair.” 

beabadoobee then climbed the pylon with a ladder from behind for “Powerlines,” swaying as she sang, “Powerlines help me feel I’m close to you. / Despite it all, I finally found the point of view.” The powerlines of the pylon surged with lights that flickered one after the other, while her band’s playing swelled.

After playing a few more older songs, including “Post,” “She Plays Bass,” and “Cologne,” beabadoobee left the stage. When she returned, she had a guitar and sang two acoustic songs, “the way things go” and an unreleased love song called “Lemon to My Lime.” She closed out her show with the hit song “Beaches” as the crowd cathartically shouted the bridge: “the way things go” along with her, as she stood alone onstage, just her and her guitar. “Didn’t think you’d ever stoop so low, getting with the only girl you know. A lousy route that only makes me say, ‘that’s pretty lame,and that’s the way things go. Oh, I guess that’s just the way things go.’”

From small rooms in London (or actually, from a literal small room that she would record some of her old songs in when she was starting out) to a sold out arena, as someone who finds a lot of joy in seeing how an artist’s journey morphs and grows, it’s been a pleasure to see beabadoobee’s.

And she’s still coming to terms with it. “This is just so hard to believe. I didn’t think in a million years this would happen to me … I called myself beabadoobee for fuck’s sake, it was a joke…a joke!” she laughs. 

“And now it’s my life.”