Last time I saw Final Fantasy play live in Seattle, I voiced concerns for his safety at the hands of an audience eager to see Bloc Party. In the headline slot at Nectar last night, I felt nervous for a different reason: I fretted that a fellow concertgoer—perhaps that chap who crowed “Final Fantastic!” so ecstatically at one point—might abduct Owen Pallett after the show and wall him up in a tower. Listening to songs inspired by the eight schools of magic in Dungeons & Dragons can do that to a guy.

As promised, the Toronto singer-songwriter-violinist performed songs from both his previous Final Fantasy albums, Has A Good Home and He Poos Clouds. But many treats were lesser-known selections. Perched over his new electro-acoustic grand piano (a “portable” monstrosity that weighs over 300 lbs.), he gave Rufus Wainwright something to worry about with his quirky and moving interpretation of “Horse Feathers” by Toronto songwriter Alex Lukashevsky. And despite entreaties to reprise his YouTube hit rendition of Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy,” he opted instead for a less-familiar cover, “An Actor’s Revenge” by Destroyer.

Returning the audience’s affection, Pallett noted that Seattle residents seem to have the best attributes of Americans and the worst of Canadians, i.e. we’re terribly passive-aggressive. (I’m sure I don’t know what he meant by that.) On a few occasions he seemed vexed while sampling violin parts live to create the loops that anchor his pieces, but he soldiered on, blaming his jitters on too much pre-show caffeine. And as for that adult-onset stuttering he complained about… well, I didn’t notice it.

I’m sure everyone had their favorite moments, but mine was the effervescent “Hey Dad,” from his forthcoming Tomlab Alphabet Series single. Morning-after memories of that turn prompted me to dig out this nugget from our interview a couple weeks ago, which I didn’t use in the finished preview feature:

“‘Hey Dad’ is a song a wrote a long, long time ago. Seven years ago. I even wrote the lyrics before then. It started as this essay that I wrote when I had first moved to Toronto, and was in a classical composition program. One the first assignments we had to do was go to a new classical concert, and write a review. And I had a bit of a meltdown. I was a little crazed, from the experience of being in Toronto, and surrounded by all this new music. I was suffering. So my essay ended up not being about the concert itself, but me. The most prominent line in that essay was about how I was going to write the great Canadian symphony, and I had it in me, I just had to shit it out, and put it on the table. And that became the main line in ‘Hey Dad.’”

We’re still waiting for that symphony, Owen. But in the meantime, please keep the ornate pop songs coming.