How Mike Posner started a music revolution right in Ann Arbor

‘I expected maybe five people to come… but then all these people just came out of the woodwork to see me play’

It’s a Thursday afternoon, and I’m attending an outdoor concert. All acoustic, somewhere between one and two hundred people, which on the whole is pretty typical of a performance in the park. I sit on the grass, one row behind the small, white, paint-chipped pavilion where the musician will be playing.  Shouts and cheers echo across the field from a nearby Little League game, and bells from the church to my left start ringing. Everything about this performance – the small crowd, the cozy outdoor venue – seeps with normality – a casual, last-minute show in a park in Franklin, Michigan. Everything, that is, except the performer, who in the past year has peaked in the Billboard top ten in 27 countries for his chart-topping single.

Mike Posner doesn’t have to be here. In fact, considering he’s just released his album At Night, Alone, he probably shouldn’t be. He should be in some fancy, expensive club celebrating worldwide fame with his producer, or at a lavish party hosted by his label. Instead, he’s here giving free concert to a few hundred fans that keeps getting interrupted by the church bells, which are apparently set to ring every fifteen minutes. His mom is here, as is the man who drove him from the airport. Posner sings a few of my favorites, including the 2010 hit “Cooler than Me” and some lesser known songs like “Be As You Are,” pausing between sets to wave hi to fans, some of whom he knows by name. Halfway through the show, he stops to thank everyone for coming out to hear him play, and to explain his reasoning behind these “ninja concerts,” free shows where Posner tweets out the time and location 24 hours in advance.

“When I’m playing these giant shows, everything is all about me,” Posner says. “I wanted to get a chance to listen and to hear from you guys. I wanted to meet the people who were paying my rent,” he jokes.

Posner goes on to tell the story of his very first ninja concert, which, to my surprise, was actually in Ann Arbor, in May of last year. The show, held at our very own Nichol’s Arboretum, came at a rough time for Posner, whose last two albums had been shelved by his label after releasing singles that failed to impress.

“Everybody pitched in,” Posner recalls of that Monday in May. “This girl named Stephanie set me up with a place to play. These two guys messaged me and told me I could park at their place. I expected maybe five people to come, I don’t know. But then all these people just came out of the woodwork to see me play. It was really amazing.”

The concert in Ann Arbor ended up drawing a crowd of over one hundred, and kicked off Posner’s ‘Ninja Tour.’ He has now done over thirty of the guerilla-style shows around the country, from New York to Nashville and everywhere in between.

If Posner has any idea that he’s not the norm, he doesn’t show it. For him, the shows have become just as much a part of his career as his regular tour. But it’s hard not to balk at the idea of a famous musician playing for free in a world where Justin Timberlake sells tickets for over $1500 and a woman gets evicted after paying for Beyoncé tickets instead of rent. Posner’s ninja concerts are an anecdote to this, a pushback against a music culture that can be so focused on industry and numbers that it sometimes forgets about the music itself.

As the concert continues, I can’t help but feel a sense of community with the people around me, all of whom are singing the lyrics to “Buried in Detroit,” and with the singer, himself, who should be a stranger but performs in a way that reminds me of listening to a friend play the guitar at a bonfire in Kerrytown, or a deck somewhere on Greenwood late one Welcome Week night when everyone else has gone home. And I realize that Mike Posner’s music revolution isn’t just that he’s performing for free. It’s that he’s performing in a way that’s extremely intimate and human. No costumes, no gimmicks, no smoke and mirrors, no autotune, no red tape or fences or security guards separating you from him. He’s just there, in front of you, the same way he was that day in the Arb, playing a song and asking you to listen.

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