The Shovel Knight Performance Is Stunning but Unfortunately Brief

On Saturday, February 22, I hiked up to the Town Hall music venue in Manhattan for Shovel Knight Live: Steel Thy Concert, in which an orchestral and rock ensemble performed tunes from Yacht Club’s hugely popular platformer. I haven’t played Shovel Knight in nearly a decade, but I love live music and the thought of hearing the game’s chiptune soundtrack rearranged for live instrumentation was enough to pique my interest. It wasn’t until I saw a sign stating that recording and taking photos during the performance was prohibited, however, that I realized how few Shovel Knight fans would ever get to hear the stunning arrangements performed at the extremely limited engagement.

The performers at Steel Thy Concert seemed all too aware of this as well. The ensemble, led by Grammy-winning 8-Bit Big Band director Charlie Rosen, performed never-before-heard rock arrangements of music most people had only heard as chiptune tracks backing up a shovel-swinging hero’s adventure. And yet, there are only two planned performances of these arrangements by this group of musicians. The setlist included selections from the base Shovel Knight game, as well as the DLC campaigns developer Yacht Club Games released. When the show reached its final number, Rosen—in defiance of the posted notices to the contrary—asked the audience to record the rest of the performance, lest the entire show become nothing but a memory for the few hundred fans in the audience. If you were wondering why the only footage from the performance seems to be of the Shovel Knight end credits theme, that’s probably why.

As a two-show concert series with performances only happening in New York and L.A., the potential audience for Shovel Knight Live is limited to people who already live in those cities, and those sickest of Shovel Knight sickos willing to invest the time and money into travelling there for one night. So as wonderful as it is to hear talented musicians reimagining these iconic tracks for a live show, it’s sad only a fraction of Shovel Knight fans will ever hear them.

And my god, what a show it was. Live performances have a way of making you appreciate aspects of a piece’s composition that you might not even process when listening to it on your headphones, or when it’s playing in the background as you whack people with a shovel in Shovel Knight. Rosen and crew’s rearrangements of composer Jake Kaufman’s original score were incredible reimaginings with guitar, horns, and strings that had me and the rest of the audience popping off in the Town Hall. Hearing a violin soar over the rest of the band had me welling up in my seat. It took me back to playing Shovel Knight on my PlayStation Vita in 2015. The grand sense of adventure and stress I felt when playing some of the more challenging levels flowed back into me after having not played the game in a decade, all punctuated by footage of the game playing in the background of each song.

Even though I hadn’t played Shovel Knight in years, I couldn’t help but get caught up in the passion in the room. In a previous life, I was studying to be a music teacher before I pivoted into journalism, and I’ve only recently gotten back to music as a hobby. Some of my defining musical projects when I was a semi-professional musician involved rearranging songs so my local choirs could perform them, so I know that breaking a piece of music you love and putting it back together as something else is the kind of thing you only do if you’re passionate about the source material.

Earlier this year I went to see the Final Fantasy VII Rebirth orchestra concert, which was an incredible show full of talented musicians, but those were more or less one-to-one recreations of the tracks you’ll hear in the RPG. Maybe it’s the hibernating composer in me hyperfixating on the little details of how a violin or horn section was able to create something new and exciting out of chiptune music, but seeing a group of incredible performers playing Shovel Knight’s music in ways it never had been before elevated the show beyond what might, on paper, just look like an event for diehard fans. It was an exceptional showcase of musical talent and passion of a sort that only a live show can truly communicate. I hope that these first two shows are successful enough that Yacht Club Games gives more people the chance to experience this performance.