To celebrate Belmont University’s homecoming this year, the folk band Judah & The Lion came back to campus to perform at The Fisher Center for “Judah & The Lion: A Belmont Homecoming.”
The band was formed by three former Belmont students, Judah Akers, Brian Macdonald and Nate Zuercher, who met at Belmont and won the 2012 Best of the Best competition.
Since then, Zuercher exited the band, leaving the homecoming show consisting of Akers and Macdonald.
It was a night filled with an airy acoustic set, jokes with the audience and a deep dive into the band’s story.
Akers and Macdonald held the audience’s attention with their presence on stage and took the audience through their career as a band and their life as friends.
Akers talked about both his parents’ divorce and his own, and the grief and depression that followed.
Macdonald kept up a running gag about dropping out of college and wanting an honorary degree from Belmont.
The band also brought on a string quartet and members of Belmont’s PHNX, a pop-rock ensemble.
PHNX’s Rob Montano, a junior commercial voice major, performed a song off their upcoming album, The Process, with them called “Heart Medicine.”
The song is about Akers’ fiancée, and he made sure to tell Montano to not mess it up in front of her.
It’s safe to say he did not.
Still, when it was just Akers and Macdonald on stage, their sound was so full and dense in each song that it was hard to believe that there were only two of them performing on stage.
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This article was written by Abby Thomas. Photos by Abby Thomas
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