Benson Boone seems to be aware of his haters.
Earlier this year, he took some of the biggest criticisms people have hurled his way during his short career and transformed them into a hilarious storyline for his “Mr. Electric Blue” music video, which has more than 7 million views on YouTube.
Some of the main critiques, as laid out in that video: He’s a one-hit wonder (“Beautiful Things”); an industry plant (he really didn’t know he could sing until just a few years ago?); too gimmicky (so many backflips); and his lyrics are weird (“moonbeam ice cream”).
To what is presumably the joy of millions of fans around the world, Boone seems to use these criticisms as fuel for his music, embracing them rather than steering clear of them.
And as was clear during his first of three sold-out shows at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City Wednesday night, it works.
Because while the haters can be loud, make no mistake: The fans are much, much, much louder.
Benson Boone’s family-friendly empire of fun
A look around the packed Delta Center quickly reveals Boone’s primary audience: As a 23-year-old international superstar who gained traction online through TikTok, the bulk of the singer’s fans are kids, teens and young adults.
At one point during the show, a little girl in the row in front of me excitedly uses a friend or family member’s phone to take a video. She’s singing every single word and swaying back and forth — and taking the phone along for the ride in what is sure to be a video too choppy to ever watch all the way through.
The crowd has a youthful energy, and the screams start well before Boone takes the stage. They intensify when he rises from below the stage and immediately does a backflip to kick off his opener, “I Wanna Be The One You Call.”
But the audience isn’t just kids who are probably going to be really tired in school the next day.
Boone has a retro vibe. He channels his inner Freddie Mercury as he drags a microphone stand with him across the stage, or engages in a brief “Ay-Oh” call and response with the audience.
The chorus of his song “Mystical Magical” — which Wednesday night had him floating across the arena in a chandelier — draws from Olivia Newton-John’s 1981 hit “Physical.” And a few of his ballads, sung at times from behind a sparkly Yamaha, call bands like Journey to mind.
Boone’s TikTok presence, coupled with his old-school vibe, creates a multigenerational appeal, and a family-friendly empire of fun.
The singer’s own family is central to his music. “Momma Song,” which features a slideshow of his family as he performs it, is a love song to his mom. “Mr. Electric Blue” was inspired by his dad, and he wrote “In the Stars” after the death of his great-grandmother.
Before performing “In the Stars” Wednesday night, Boone encouraged people in the crowd to insert themselves in the song and honor the loss of loved ones in their own lives.
“Be respectful to people around you,” he said. “If you need to put an arm around them, put an arm around them.”
Throughout the show, friends and families — particularly moms and their young daughters — seemed to be serenading each other as they sang along. Sometimes, Boone being on the stage felt of secondary importance.
The show often felt like a massive singalong, and it could sometimes be hard to hear Boone over the crowd — he actually motioned for people to lay off the screaming just a little bit during his softer ballad “Love of Mine.”
But there were moments when his vocals really cut through.
He can belt some seriously high notes, and hold them for a long time — his cover of Adele’s “All I Ask” was a real highlight.
After Boone’s powerful finish to “Mr. Electric Blue,” a man in front of me made a bold declaration to his family: “He’s so good. May be the best thing I’ve ever seen.”
While Boone has absolutely nothing to prove, he made a strong case for any of the doubters that his voice can stand on its own and that he’s a lot more than his flips (although there were also plenty of those).
A full-blown production
Boone’s superstardom came quickly, propelled by the song “Beautiful Things,” which has more than 2 billion streams on Spotify. His overnight rise to fame is a true rarity in this industry, and his Salt Lake show maintained a similar swiftness.
He performed 20 songs in two hours — technically 22 songs; one was a medley of three numbers he put together since he said he didn’t have enough time to perform each one individually.
Physically, the singer stayed busy on the stage designed for his “American Heart” tour. He frequently walked or ran up and down the long runway, sometimes leapt off the stage into the crowd, occasionally would do a way-too-casual jump from the stage to the top of a piano, and, of course, did a handful of backflips and front flips — he’d already done five flips by his seventh song.
Throughout the show, he briefly interacted with the crowd. But it wasn’t until his third to last song that he really took a minute — or eight — to chat with fans.
And it wasn’t your usual chit-chat.
Before performing “Reminds Me of You,” Boone singled out a woman in the crowd and asked her if she’d ever been in love. The answer was no, although she was “in like” with a guy named Noah a long time ago.
In a feat almost more impressive than his vocals, Boone took this person’s response and created what can best be described as fan fiction. For a staggering eight minutes, he established a remarkably detailed story of high school romance that ended without any resolution as Noah simply vanished from school one day, leaving his girlfriend with nothing more than reminders of him.
Boone puts on a production. There’s confetti that comes in the form of red, white and blue hearts to go with the “American Heart” album theme; pyro; frenetic lighting; a giant floating chandelier; three outfit changes; a T-shirt cannon that shoots out a signed shirt with the cover song he’s going to sing that night printed across it; and on Wednesday night, a quirky, eight-minute story about high school romance and a grand total of seven flips.
Even after all of that, near the end of the two-hour show, he’s still able to sing the high notes of his breakthrough hit “Beautiful Things” that launched him to fame — though he could easily let the crowd finish it out for him.
Boone’s wide-ranging voice can stand on its own, without all of the theatrics and flips. It would be nice to have more stripped down moments in the show, but the entertainer seems to get a thrill out of starring in a full-blown production.
And, as he made clear Wednesday night, he’ll gladly do it all over again two more times in Salt Lake City before closing out the North American leg of his tour and moving on to the next chapter of a career that appears to still be on the rise.
“This is the only city we’re playing multiple nights in a row,” Boone told his Salt Lake City crowd with a sense of awe and gratitude. “We’re playing three — you guys sold out three! Come on, that’s ridiculous! I love you guys, thank you so much."