Beautiful Strangers at the Bataclan

by Kevin Morby

I was listening to the Rolling Stones’ Goats Head Soup, running on a treadmill, when a television in the gym said BREAKING with a blood-red banner. A mass shooting was unfolding in Paris, in real time, at a music venue called the Bataclan.

This was 2015, and I was at home in Kansas City. I’d never heard of a mass shooting taking place in Europe, much less at a show. I had believed, perhaps naively, that the sanctity of music itself was a forcefield from evil, but I was wrong.

A year after the shooting, I wrote and released a song called “Beautiful Strangers,” which references the tragedy at the Bataclan, along with the Pulse nightclub shootings in Orlando and the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. The song has arguably become my most popular, and though it’s been seven years, its rise within my catalog is a testament to our ever-horrendous current events. Its subject matter of mass shootings and police brutality has aged all too well.

The first time I performed “Beautiful Strangers” in Paris was in 2016, almost a year to the day after the shootings. We were booked at a venue called the La Trabendo, just a few miles away from the Bataclan.

When I began singing the second chorus—pray for Paris, they cannot scare us, or stop the music—the crowd erupted. After the show, tearful fans told me that they were at the Bataclan or had lost someone there the night of the attacks, and that my song brought them some comfort. I remember one woman in particular, tears falling from behind her glasses, hugging me as she recounted her experience and the friends she lost. I couldn’t fathom what she was saying. She had witnessed war-like bloodshed and lived to tell the tale. She pulled me close and told me this was her first time back at a show since that night and Merci. 

Each time I return to Paris, “Beautiful Strangers” hushes the room in a way that none of my other songs can. This is delicate for any artist. I treat “Beautiful Strangers” with care. I’m intentional with when and how I perform it in the set, as I know many people come specifically to hear it.

When I wrote the song, playing big rooms in Europe was a pipe dream, but over the years my audience has slowly grown. When my agent put forward the routing for a European tour in support of my album, This Is A Photograph, he’d booked the Bataclan, a new high-water mark for us overseas.

There was an immediate nervous energy amongst my team and me around the date. We were earnestly hopeful about the booking and wanted to put on a show worthy of a venue of that size, but because it was the Bataclan, I had the added catastrophizing thought that someone might target the gig because of the song.

Then, six months before the European tour, while I was playing shows in America, my friend Claire texted me. She said that two of her friends, a young couple by the names of Leo and Lisette, had been traveling from their home in New Mexico to my show in Denver when they got into a car accident, and Leo died. Claire asked if I could send Lisette my well wishes in the hospital, where she was in critical condition.

I remember the first time I sold out a one-thousand capacity venue. It was in Chicago in 2018, and I had a panic attack backstage thinking about the amount of people leaving the safety of their homes, entering the world full of danger, just to see me play. One thousand people with a ticket that held my name, their fate in my hands, by my design. 

Did booking a show in Denver that night inadvertently kill Leo? I sent flowers to Lisette in the hospital, and a video of me singing the song “Change” by Big Thief.

Would you live forever, never die
While everything around passes?
. . .
Death, like a door
To a place we've never been before

Months later, Claire sent another message to say that Lisette had been released from the hospital and that she and Leo’s mother were planning a trip to Paris, where they would see me perform at the Bataclan in Leo’s memory. I was honored, but it heightened the uneasy feeling that something bad might happen that night. 

Beyond the ominous Bataclan booking coupled with Lisette and Leo’s story, touring in 2022 after COVID had shut down live music for two years felt like having the world handed back, but in shambles. While we dodged an invisible virus, keeping track of vaccine cards and masks, I worried that at a moment’s notice the tour could be pulled out from beneath us. The loss of tens of thousands of dollars hung in the balance. To make matters worse, once we landed in Europe, we learned about new restrictions: if we tested positive while over there, we wouldn’t be allowed back home without a full quarantine. Life on the road has always been difficult, but in 2022 it felt nearly impossible.

On the morning of May 24^th, 2022, I opened the blinds of the tour bus to face the facade of the Bataclan. Until that moment, I’d only seen it in photographs and violent video footage. I walked off the bus and headed into the venue, stopping to read the silver plaque that hangs out front. It translates to: In memory of the victims murdered and injured in these places on November 13, 2015. When a bandmate asked, I guessed that 30 people were killed in the attacks, but an internet search reminded me that it was 137. 

Inside, the Bataclan is beautiful with its red velvet chairs in the balconies hovering above the worn wood floor of the ballroom. Its 1,500-person capacity is the perfect size. I call these venues gigantically small. They’re grandiose for the performer on stage, but intimate for the fans.

My French friend Agnieszka had told me a story about someone she knew who had survived the attacks at Bataclan by pretending to be dead, lying motionless on the floor as actual dead bodies multiplied around him. To feel lifeless, he repeated the words: I am a rock. I put his mantra into a verse in “Beautiful Strangers.” I scanned the room, wondering where he had lain.

Despite the Bataclan’s beauty, it’s impossible not to imagine pools of blood. People jumping from the balcony. The terrorists in their suicide vests. The police with their machine guns. Ghosts abound.

It’s my custom to spend the entire evening inside the venue after load-in. Like clocking into any job, I prefer to stay until my work is done. But at the Bataclan, after soundcheck, I needed to get lost for a couple hours. I broke my pre-show rule and left to wander around Paris, distracting myself. I met with a friend; I made a phone call; I sat at an outdoor cafe. I even thought of reaching out to my therapist for an emergency session. I cursed whatever part of my ego would book a show on hallowed grounds. It was a terrible idea. The weight of the night was too heavy for me to carry. 

I returned to the venue shortly after doors opened for the show and made my way to the cramped backstage. I ate a quick dinner and spent the two hours before showtime pacing the stairwell landing between the stage and green room. I did breathing exercises to the white noise of the opener, and made peace with the potential of it being a somber night. Suddenly “Beautiful Strangers” (or any of my songs for that matter) felt daunting to have to perform.

It’s become clear over the years that the show we deliver is up to the audience as much as it is up to us. There are nights where we play our hearts out, and the crowd stands stiff, arms crossed, and the evening never quite achieves liftoff. Then there are those nights when the fans are so full of energy that it’s on us to match them, and those are the nights we really fly. 

When we took the stage at the Bataclan and went into our first song, the applause flew through the room like chaotic, wild birds. The audience collectively became louder than the music. It was immediately clear that the night was out of our hands, and in those of the people of Paris. I had feared the show was doomed, but the audience said, Absolument pas, dude!

After the first tune I scanned the crowd, and the first people I saw were Lisette and Leo’s mom, front and center, crying and holding one another. I had forgotten they were coming at all. But there they were, and this time Lisette had made it to the gig, with Leo’s mother and Leo’s spirit in tow. We launched into the set, performing for the living and the dead.

The show passed by in a wonderful blur. As we neared the end of the set, it felt like we were just getting warmed up. I wished the performance would never end.

In his book Time Quake, Kurt Vonnegut writes about the jazz pianist Fats Waller who, during his favorite performances, would shout at the crowd to “Shoot me while I'm happy!” I’ve carried that phrase with me throughout my career during my own best shows, and it made its way through my mind on stage that night at the Bataclan, bearing new weight.

When we disappeared before the encore, it was obvious we were saving “Beautiful Strangers” for last. I’d long envisioned the moment; the band and I performing the song to pin-drop silence at the Bataclan. Instead, the audience began to clap in time with the first chords, creating a beat where there’d never been one. What had been a song of mourning became one of celebration.

After the show, we popped champagne on the floor of the ballroom with the promoter and venue staff. Despite COVID, we smoked cigarettes inside, toasted glasses, and hugged one another close. Not only had we made it to the Bataclan, we had made it through the Bataclan. For all I cared, the tour might as well be over. 

James Baldwin wrote that “the world is full of rooms,” and it’s true. Rooms are everywhere, especially for touring musicians. Each night a new one, with its own personality, its own history. Sometimes rooms, inevitably, will be filled with unfathomable, horrific things. But sometimes, they will be filled with music.

I have a quiet tradition after milestone shows. I like to be the last one in the venue, save the cleaning crew, to feel the silence and reflect on the musical chaos that preceded it. Once the rest of the band was on the bus, I went back into the Bataclan and admired it—a chapel and a graveyard, empty again—alone.

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KEVIN MOBRY is an American musician, singer, and songwriter. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

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