On Thursday, 26 February, two nights after the current president of the United States bloviated his way through the longest State of the Union address ever, Mavis Staples delivered the real SOTU at the Colonial Theater in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. During a week bookended by Tuesday’s speech at the Capitol and the subsequent entrance into a war with Iran, Staples offered a message that felt more relevant and urgent than ever.
When Mavis Staples comes around, it behoves you to be there, which explains the sold-out crowd at the Colonial, the theatre made famous by the run-out scene in the 1958 movie The Blob. Aisle-mates of ours drove nearly 100 miles from Asbury Park, New Jersey, to see the show. Whether audience members crossed state lines or walked down to the Colonial, no one left the theatre let down by Mavis Staples, who remains as compelling a performer as she’s ever been.
While Staples has often spiked her setlists in recent years with cover songs by the likes of Talking Heads (“Slippery People”) and Funkadelic (“Can You Get to That”), at the Colonial she was focused on her legacy with the Staple Singers, along with four songs from her 2025 album, Sad and Beautiful World. While many of these songs have been the foundation of Staples’ live shows for decades, taken together, the songs formed a setlist that was an intentional call for resistance and peace in difficult times.
Fans hoping for Staple Singers classics were rewarded with “City in the Sky”, “I’m Just Another Soldier”, “Handwriting on the Wall”, “Freedom Highway”, “Heavy Makes You Happy”, and “Respect Yourself”. All were delivered with both gospel and rock ‘n’ roll fervor by Staples and her band. Staples spoke often between songs, not getting too specific, but also not shying away from noting her distaste for ICE and other aspects of the current administration.
Nobody in the Colonial’s audience told Staples to “shut up and sing”. Sing she did, though. In addition to the Staple Singers’ classics, her renditions of songs from Sad and Beautiful World easily justified the opinion of anybody who might have thought it was one of the best albums of 2025.
In a show full of highlights, the emotional pinnacle may have been a heartfelt rendition of the Jeff Tweedy-written title track for Staples’ 2010 album, You Are Not Alone. “A broken home / A broken heart / Isolated and afraid / Open up this is raid / I wanna get it through to you / You’re not alone” hit the crowd hard, and probably stayed with many concertgoers, even as they made their way back home.
Staples closed the night with her cover of Eddie Hinton’s classic, “Everybody Needs Love”. It was an upbeat way to end the performance, but it also underscored the show’s overall message: love is a serious business, it can be used to combat evil, and everybody does indeed need it. No exceptions.
“Mavis for President” bumper stickers and buttons were available at the merch table. That’s a fun idea, but Mavis Staples made it clear at the Colonial that she’s got no time to be president: she’s got a higher calling.