Joe Purdy @ The Mash House, Edinburgh, 4 Jun

A good singer-songwriter gig should feel like you're being welcomed into someone's house. When there's no band, no big stage show, you need something else from the artist on stage to create that element of performance. Any singer-songwriters who aren't sure how to create that would be well advised to go along to a Joe Purdy show. 

Joe Purdy is one of those singer-songwriters whose career benefitted from some really great TV spots in the early noughties – a couple of big singles on things like Lost and Grey's Anatomy – but those tracks cast him as a kind of identikit indie-folkster whose earnest balladeering is tailor-made for the emotional climax of TV shows. Live, he's a different prospect altogether, an old fashioned, pre-Dylan American folk singer with a charming and disarming stage patter, a genuinely beautiful voice, and a folder full of songs. 

And so, he turned The Mash House into his house. New song Kristine was punctuated with a story about how his mum doesn't like the lyric about getting stoned. Rousing love song Laura Wilson, about his third grade sweetheart, became a proper crowd singalong, full of gusto. Playing an old number from the Alan Lomax songbook, Joe even said something to the tune of: "If you wanna know what songs I sing when I'm just entertaining myself, it's this. I love this song, I'd sing it even if nobody was listening." 

One wonders whether a smaller venue, packed out, may have suited the occasion better than a half full club. It was a bit of a shame too that a 10pm curfew didn't allow for any kind of encore. But every house party has to end at some stage – just make sure you go to the next one.