Ezra Ray Hart – Rivers Casino – Philadelphia (A PopEntertainment.com Concert Review)
- PopEntertainment
- Dec 7
- 3 min read
Updated: 3 minutes ago
Ezra Ray Hart – Rivers Casino – Philadelphia, PA – December 5, 2025
To paraphrase his royal purple badness, on Friday night Ezra Ray Hart partied like it was 1999.
Ezra Ray Hart is an occasional side project “supergroup” featuring the lead singers of three big 1990s alt-rock bands – Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray, Kevin Griffin of Better Than Ezra and Emerson Hart of Tonic. The singers – all friends who have worked together off and on since 2018 – are on the road for their “90s Hits and Xmas Riffs” Tour, where they play some songs from each of their bands, some other hit singles from the 90s and beyond, and a few holiday songs to keep things festive.
As Emerson Hart told me about the tour setlist a couple of days before the show, “It has to be a song that everybody knows and loves. There are really no stinkers. We don't have any B-sides in the set. It's all hits, all the time.”
And that it was. From wall to wall, it was one favorite after the other, as the band was obviously having a blast on the stage dwarfed by huge blow-up snowmen, Santas and Christmas trees. (McGrath wandered down from the stage and into the audience a few times as well.)
They started off with the biggest hit from any of these bands, McGrath doing a spirited version of Sugar Ray’s bouncy number one smash from 1999, “Every Morning.” (Sugar Ray’s “Fly” would have also have arguably been a number one hit, too, but the song was never officially released as a single, so it never was counted on the pop charts.)
Hart then rocked the joint with a fiery version of Tonic’s “Open Up Your Eyes.” Then Griffin took over with a fun take of his band’s classic alt-rock post-breakup ditty “Good.”
The first of the holiday songs came then, doing the joyful California Christmas vibe of The Beach Boys’ “Little Saint Nick.” There were four holiday songs through the length of the show – two modern holiday standards, this one and later a gorgeous take on George Michael’s Wham! favorite “Last Christmas,” both with McGrath taking lead vocals.
The other two were kind of originals to the band. The playful “Must Be Christmas” was a song from Griffin’s holiday-themed supergroup Band of Merrymakers, which released an album in 2014. McGrath was one of the guests on the album, on this particular song, so they pulled it out of the stocking for the show. The last song was “Sacks of Candy,” a holiday-themed variation on the old Marcy Playground hit “Sex and Candy,” which Griffin apparently wrote for his little daughter a couple of decades ago when she misunderstood the original song’s lyrics, title and subject.
Also spread throughout the set was a series of adventurous covers of songs that were mostly popular during the bands’ 90s heydays, including rowdy takes on Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping,” and frisky encore performances of Blur’s “Song 2” and James’ “Laid.” They also did a funky version of Rod Stewart’s disco classic “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” with Hart on lead vocals.
Between the full songs, they also threw in extended snippets of a wide variety of older hit songs, everything from Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom,” to Daryl Hall and John Oates’ “Sara Smile,” to Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It.”
However, the bulk of the show was made up of the best of the three core bands, and those did not disappoint. From McGrath’s playful samba-vibed version of “Someday” and his reggae-ska favorite “Fly,” to Hart’s hard-hitting and vaguely cynical love songs “If You Could Only See” and “You Wanted More” to Griffin’s slamming take on his way-underrated “Desperately Wanting,” it truly was all hits, all the time.
Jay S. Jacobs
Copyright ©2025 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: December 7, 2025.
Photos by Cecilia Orlando © 2025. All rights reserved.
