Mavi Celebrates the Sadness on Tour in Boston
Backstage and in the crowd at the introspective rapper’s recent show, where his harrowing songs transformed into anthems of overcoming.
At Boston’s Paradise Rock Club in September, Mavi enters a modest green room with backpacks and duffels scattered around, and two small chip and vegetable platters sitting in front of wall outlets painted to look like the members of Kiss. The rapper and producer Ovrkast, one of the night’s openers, is making a beat in the corner, quietly tapping away on his sampler. It’s an immediately calm and inviting atmosphere, an upgrade from Mavi’s previous tours. “This how we comin’,” he says, proudly surveying the room between bites of a pre-show chicken and shrimp burrito.
In a crisp white tee and black LRG sweatpants, the North Carolina native admits to feeling fear during his first big shows, when Jack Harlow brought him out on the road in 2021. Since then, he’s become an indie rap mainstay and a bona fide headliner. But these gigs, in support of his harrowing third studio album, Shadowbox, feel different. “When I did my first solo tour, I was known,” he says. “Now, I feel loved.” He pauses to reflect on the difference between the two. “I don’t think everything you know is a choice, but I do think everything you love is a choice,” he explains. “The things people who come to these shows share with me and the encouragement they give me—it feels hella love.”
Mavi recorded Shadowbox in the throes of a breakup and lapses into alcohol and drug addiction. The album’s loose concept revolves around his shadow self, the lingering darkness formed by his mistakes and doubts. These are raps projected from the bottom of a self-dug pit of despair.
The 25-year-old’s music has always navigated the tenuous space between rap notoriety and personal struggle, but much of his imagery on Shadowbox involves him scraping at the edges of his skull, looking for a way out. “I’m So Tired” opens with one of the starkest bars of his career: “Today my grandmother turned 80/And I’m on three Percocets, I ain’t even ate yet.” You can hear the exasperation in his voice—but he doesn’t dwell in the tar pit forever. “I claim I’m quttin’, it’s been too many tomorrows,” he raps at the beginning of “Grindstone,” offering a sliver of hope that, one day, he’ll meet his own challenge. These confessions are fleet but dense, the kind of verses only a child of both MF Doom and Future would ever be able to conjure.
At this point, it seems like he’s come out of the album’s bouts with self-destruction with his hands raised high. He’s about to close on his first house in North Carolina, and he’s enjoying playing these songs, heart-wrenching as they can be, clean and sober.
“I was hella scared,” he says of performing Shadowbox on tour. “No other album have I thought, Oh shit, I’ma have to perform this onstage. These songs hurt, bro.” During the tour’s opening show in Brooklyn, Mavi cried onstage for the first time ever while performing Shadowbox’s penultimate track, “Testimony,” as fans screamed lines like “I wish the threat of loss ain’t come with all my luster” right back at him.
Backstage in Boston, though, the vibes are serene and familial. Openers Messiah! and Ovrkast join Mavi, and Mavi’s DJ, Elijah Judah, to bust out a few dozen push-ups each, psyching themselves up for the crowd. “No song I make is completed until I perform it live,” Mavi tells me just before he takes the stage.
The lights dim over a crowd of hundreds of college students and local rap fans as Elijah posts up behind his equipment. As the distorted piano and orchestral swell of Shadowbox’s spoken-word opener “20,000 Leagues” wafts through the speakers, Mavi lays down on a bench adjacent to the upper balcony in the backstage area, one last moment of relaxation before the tempest.
He moves to the railing overlooking the stage just before “Open Waters” begins, while the crowd searches for him. “Boston, behind you,” he whispers into the mic, greeting his audience from on high before diving straight into the raps. The crowd briefly erupts and whips their phones out to record. But everyone soon falls silent as Mavi pours his heart out for the first time that night; it will not be the last.
The further he gets into “Open Waters,” a handful of people start rapping with him, particularly at this bar: “Though they won’t budge, I’m in love with my lil’ shackles/Dwellin’ in the shadows.” Even the people not rapping are intently fixated on him, sharing their energy as he tears through memories of psilocybin trips on the beach and capillaries filled with “lagging molasses.” By the middle of the song, when he ends a tortured verse with the words, “Boston, I need you,” Mavi and the crowd are sharing a smile that stretches from the floor to the ceiling.
Whatever sadness is littered through the lyrics of Shadowbox—or older projects like Laughing So Hard, It Hurts and Let the Sun Talk—evaporates the second Mavi raps them into open air. Surrounded by moving bodies, it’s even more apparent how lively the beats on the new album are—not mosh pit-ready, but primed for swaying, light jumping, and plenty of rap hands. During “Grindstone,” I lock onto a young Black man near the front, one of a handful of people in a sea of enthusiastic head nods who’s going bar-for-bar with Mavi, making a line like “Just look into these eyes, yellow by liquor and my cries choked” hit exceedingly hard. The audience bobs to groovier cuts like “Tether” and “Too Much to Zelle,” and locks in to sing their way through dirges like “Drunk Prayer” and “The Giver.” But no matter the song, there’s never a stone face or mean mug in the house during the nearly 90-minute set. Especially not from Mavi.
If Shadowbox the album is Mavi face-planting and slowly working his way up from various L’s, then Shadowbox the show is the victory lap of celebration with extended family. He relishes every second of performing “Colors” with the young singer-songwriter Chenayder and doing a rare rendition of loosie “Silent Heel” with a more-than-game Messiah! and Ovrkast. Mavi also goes back and forth with the crowd often, like at the end of “The Giver,” when he professes how grateful he is to be working his dream job. An audience member quickly yells back, “You deserve it! Congratulations!” At this, Mavi stands onstage stunned, as the crowd chants his name for about a minute straight. The gravity of the moment, and of the whole show, isn’t lost on anyone, but the joy drowns any other feelings out.
That celebratory air lingers after Mavi leaves the stage. A group of fans do the Electric Slide, while others make their way to the merch booth to meet the man of the hour and thank him for his work. Everyone is so caught up in the spirit that Mavi’s manager has to cut in to remind him they’re about to be fined for running over the venue’s curfew.
Undeterred, Mavi takes the party outside. Flanked on either side by his crew and fans, he takes pictures and answers questions as if he were running for office. He speaks with every remaining fan until close to midnight, fielding impromptu rap debates and stories of people’s lives under the club’s marquee. One person in line thanks Mavi for allowing them to collectively “celebrate the sadness.” The enormity of the night washes over Mavi as the last stragglers stroll up Commonwealth Avenue. Five years into his career, he is known; he is loved.
