IDKHOW, opener Jack Lutz bend time and space at Cleveland HOB

I Dont Know How But They Found Me (IDKHOW)

May 22, 2025
House of Blues, Cleveland OH
Opener: Jack Lutz 

By Robert McCune

Time and time again, we are witness to something that seems to prove that time travel is possible. And even that time travelers are among us. Such strange things were afoot at the Cleveland House of Blues on a recent Thursday night. 

If you missed it, and you happen to know a crazy, wild-eyed scientist with a peculiarly modified Deloreon, you might want to set the dashboard computer to MAY 22. 2025. 20:00 and get that baby up to 88MPH stat. Just don’t be so obvious about it that Libyan terrorists show up in a van with a rocket launcher to crash the party. 

Dialogue delivered by Dr. Emmett Brown in that scene of 1985’s “Back to the Future” inspired Dallas Weekes to name his latest music project and band I Dont Know How But They Found Me (IDKHOW). Weekes once described IDKHOW as “a band out of time,” influenced heavily by the music of the 1980s, and that time ripple definitely reverberated from the HOB stage. It even struck opener Jack Lutz, a native Ohioan who in his early 20s looks even younger and yet rocked a 60-year-old song in his set with The Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” 

Lutz and his backing band lit up the stage with youthful exuberance, performing tracks from his first full-length EP, Heartbreak Season. At times evoking Marty McFly and The Pinheads, with Lutz’s face-melting guitar riffs enough to make Huey Lewis megaphone: “Son, it’s just too darn loud.” Despite supposedly being in his “heartbreak season,” Lutz brought his repertoire of young love medleys with songs including “Star-Crossed Lover,” “Girl of My Dreams,” and “Summer Love” that had everyone dancing as if they were at the “Enchantment Under the Sea Dance.” 

For IDKHOW’s pulse-pounding performance, Weekes was more George/Crispin than Marty/Michael J., with a mop that he brushed back and whipped with dramatic flair. With a style often reminiscent of David Byrne’s Talking Heads and the Weird Science of Oingo Boingo, the indie pop solo project - with Weekes on bass and vocals, backed by members of Phantom Planet - electrified the crowd from the jump with the electronic “Leave Me Alone.” 

Weekes weaved in some songs from his former project, The Brobecks, with “Cluster Hug” and “Visitation of the Ghost.” Fan favorites such as “Do It All the Time,” which among others sounds like it should retroactively soundtrack a 1980s John Hughes-Cusack movie, stirred singalongs that, at band breaks, were so melodic they raised goosebumps. Other moments of fun fan interaction leaned into pure silliness, as when Weekes parted the crowd like a Red Sea and descended into it with a megaphone as, in unison, the singer and audience medleyed Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please” with a little “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” from the movie “Sinners,” and Chappell Roan’s “Hot To Go.” 

Things got “heavy” as IDKHOW delved into hardrock hysteria with the two-parter “Speak of the Devil” and “Satanic Panic.” And Weekes teased the oldies in the crowd with a cover snippet of Spacehog’s mid-90s-one-hit-wonder “In the Meantime” that he abandoned after one chorus. After leaving the crowd hot to go with the second single off the first album, “Choke,” and the requisite 50 seconds off stage, IDKHOW returned for a 2-song encore starting with “Nobody Likes the Opening Band,” which Weekes clarified was never meant to be derogative but instead is a plea to the crowd to give something new a chance. 

The evening ended with some good old-fashioned “Razzmatazz,” as IDKHOW vanished in a haze of colored spotlight, like a butterfly off to effect a rippling rewriting of history by riding the vortex into a tragically dull point in someone’s recent timeline and turning it completely upside down with a night of time-and-space-bending rock. 

Robert McCune is a full-time journalist, a part-time photo journalist, and aspiring rock journalist. Follow his journey on Instagram at Every_Thing_After_Photo, and subscribe to the podcast on Apple and Spotify.