Speedy Ortiz played ONCE Somerville – 9/17

Former Bostonians Speedy Ortiz headlined one of the last handful of shows for ONCE’s outdoor summer concert series at Boynton Yards on Friday.

A lot has changed since the early 2010s, when Speedy were one of the (greater) Boston bands and I was just starting to find my footing in the scene (i.e. how to spend as much time in Allston as possible despite living in a dorm near the Fenway). They were one of the first bands I photographed prolifically, from opening gigs for Pissed Jeans and The Breeders to Great Scott, the Lawn on D, the Northeastern Starbucks, and even the first Pitchfork Fest I covered in Chicago for my college music magazine. Their local gigs got fewer and further between in recent years though, as bandleader Sadie Dupuis relocated from Massachusetts, and it’d been over two years since their last one (for obvious reasons). Consequently, Friday night’s gig in the misty ONCE parking lot felt like a pretty special homecoming.

Kicking off with early fan favorite “Taylor Swift,” the band ran through a career-spanning setlist derived from a complex chronology and position-in-tracklist formula (which required a chart according to Dupuis), and brought a long downtime’s worth of kinetic energy to the stage. They sounded great too, with Dupuis and guitarist Andy Moholt shredding with righteous abandon, bassist Audrey Zee Whitesides going airborne at every opportunity and Pinkwash’s Joey Doubek rounding out a new lineup on drums. Handpicked openers Squitch and Boston-via-Harlem MC Billy Dean Thomas also brought the goods, making this a night to remember in closing out my summer at Boynton Yards.

And as a final note on that, I’ve gotta take one last opportunity to sing the praises of the team at ONCE for making an excellent season of local gigs happen during this perilous and weird time for live music. We needed a ray of sun for the scene after the misery of last year, and these shows really felt like that for me. Here’s hoping that ONCE has secured a new full-time, indoor home by next summer, but I’d be thrilled to see this series come back, too.

Check out a gallery of photos from the whole night below.