It all started with a promise - “we’ll grow old together / and this love will never / this old love will never die”.
We’ve been growing old with multi-ARIA award-winning artist and renowned songwriter, Lior, since 2005. He won our hearts with his debut single ‘This Old Love’ back then and has continued to serenade us in the most spectacular settings since.
Most recently, Lior has been embarking on a national showcase of his stupendous discography accompanied by the excellence of Australia’s best symphony orchestras.
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“It’s amazing. Particularly after the last two years, it’s nice to be back in these beautiful grand spaces and beautiful venues. From zero to one hundred,” says Lior.
“Over the years I have done orchestral shows in the past and a lot of my songs have orchestral arrangements so these shows have enabled me to have some new ones drawn up as well and some older ones refreshed and made much better. It’s a real journey going back and choosing songs across the whole catalogue and presenting them with some pretty interesting orchestral arrangements that I’ve managed to build on over the years.”
As part of his touring schedule, Lior, sans orchestra, will be returning to Geelong, playing at the newly renovated and reopened historically significant venue, The Palais Geelong, on Saturday 15 October 2022. Taking on a more intimate arrangement, this show will allow audiences to see Lior in his most natural element.
“Geelong is a solo intimate show. It’s myself and my guitar – well myself and my five guitars. You know, these shows have their own magic because I can go off script. The orchestral shows have got to be planned because everyone has to follow me and I have charts and everything. So the magic of these shows is the other end of the spectrum. I can goof around and let the show go where it goes, and converse with the crowd, and tell stories about the song, and if someone wants to hear a song they can yell it out and, all going well, I can play it,” he laughs.
“It has that beautiful lounge room feel. I haven’t been to Geelong in so long – I think it was the matter of the right venue to pop up and when the Palais got in touch I was like ‘yeah this looks like a great venue’. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve been to Geelong since the days of Autumn Flow so that’s like fifteen years which is amazing considering it’s only an hour down the road from Melbourne.
“This whole experience with Geelong, it just goes to show that when good venues pop up, artists want to go there.”
Since the 2005 ARIA certified gold debut album, Lior has released four studio albums and two EPs. Audiences will be pleased that a lot of this ground will be covered during his live set.
“The advantage of now having a number of bodies of work out there, and as you and I both know, when there is familiarity that often translates to a deeper connection. I hope these Geelong shows speak to that.”
His EP collection includes last year’s collaborative effort, Animal In Hiding, with long time performative collaborator, Domini Forster. Forster will be joining Lior at the Palais as both a supporting act and a guest to perform tracks from the 2021 body of work.
“Domini will be the support artist and will jump up and do a few songs from Animal in Hiding with me, which has been a really beautiful project. Dom has been my supporting artist for quite a few years and has been my backing vocalist and we have done a lot of singing together.”
“Before Covid we thought, ‘there’s a real synergy when we sing together, let’s see if that translates to songwriting’, and we started writing together to see how we’d go. The first song we wrote together, ‘Where Will We Be’, ended up on my most recent solo album and then we felt like there was potential for greater collaboration so we embarked on it. It became like a late sixties Simon and Garfunkel thing between us.”
You can see that connection come to life on the Live and Intimate stage at The Palais Geelong at 297 Moorabool Street, Geelong on Saturday, October 15. Tickets can be purchased here.
