There’s something uncanny about performance spaces just before the first visitors arrive. A room that will soon be filled with bodies and sound is eerily quiet. The unused props are the only hint of what is to come.

This is how it felt at 7:45 on a Tuesday at Sawtooth Kitchen & Bar in Hanover. Amy Alexander was setting up to DJ another round of weekly karaoke. Rosy pink lights beamed down on the stage at one end of the long, subterranean restaurant. Tables formed a semicircle around the performance area.

Alexander propped up a whiteboard to the left of the stage. She laid out a handful of markers and a basket of paper squares for singers to jot down their song requests. Kieran Campion, Sawtooth’s owner, helped her angle the small projector at a collapsible screen on the right where the lyrics will be displayed.

At 8:15, Kanga Break, a 40-year-old West Lebanon resident, strode in wearing green Converse and neon fishnet tights. She wrote her name next to the number one on the whiteboard. A couple minutes later, the first bars of Portishead’s “Glory Box” rang out from the hanging speakers. The singer’s voice came in clear and soulful, transitioning effortlessly between registers. She did some side-eye during the song’s sassier moments and stood stock-still for the serious ones. And so the night began.

At first, Campion had reservations about hosting karaoke despite receiving a flurry of requests. Part of Sawtooth’s ethos is showcasing burgeoning local talent; karaoke seemed too casual.

“I wasn’t really sure how it fit into our mission,” he said in a recent interview. Eventually though, he caved and started hosting monthly karaoke nights with a live band in February 2023.

Then last August, Campion bumped the event to every Tuesday at 8 p.m. and replaced the band with Alexander as the DJ.

“People who do karaoke are pretty faithful and when they know it’s on they’ll come every week,” Campion said.

Alexander, who runs the events company Events As Planned, has been DJing karaoke at local spots around the Upper Valley since 2017. A karaoke fan herself, she always makes sure to get on stage and sing a few songs when she’s hosting.

“It adds something when the DJ is involved,” she explained.

In the past year, the Sawtooth karaoke has garnered a following of about 15 or so dedicated regulars. Over the course of an hour, some of them started trickling in. First they beelined for the DJ booth to put in their song requests, then filed to the bar for a drink. If they were nervous about singing, it was impossible to tell. When the opening notes of their song came on, they abandoned their drinks and leaped on stage to pluck the mic from its stand.

Saethryd Swanepoel, 22, of Lebanon, delivered a rendition of metal band Type O Negative’s “I Don’t Wanna Be Me.” Lyrics already learned, she thrashed around on stage, head-banging and growling. Her body curled into the microphone, almost like she was performing to herself.

For many of Sawtooth’s regulars, karaoke is their creative outlet. “It’s my favorite thing to do,” said a regular and Lebanon resident named Walt, who declined to provide his last name. Singing karaoke is a way for him to still be musical and perform for a crowd without knowing how to read music. Beyond Sawtooth, he also attends karaoke gigs up to three times a week at venues across the Upper Valley. “All of them are kind of special,” he said.

Karaoke has been experiencing a revival in the Upper Valley in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to Sawtooth, Lebanon’s SNAX and the Imperial Buffet & Lounge in Claremont have become two popular spots in the past couple years.

The 3 Cat Cafe at the White River Junction Mobil Gas Station has also started hosting karaoke on Friday nights since early July.

“We’re trying to figure out different entertainment that will pick up business at the bar,” said Jeanne Manchester, the manager of the bar and gas station. “It brings in a decent crowd.”

An hour into the night, a young, lanky man strode on stage and belted out the first lines of Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life.” His vibrato pinged around the restaurant and patrons swiveled their heads to watch. Like a seasoned jazz singer, he leaned against a long pole before pushing off and breezing across the stage again. The audience erupted into applause.

For Alex Rushton, a 24-year-old aspiring actor who stage managed Shaker Bridge Theatre’s production of “Ripcord,” this spring, karaoke is a chance to hone his performance skills and even make connections in the industry.

“You never know who’s going to be listening,” he said.

The same is true of 25-year-old Izzy Diaz, a Hanover resident and bartender at Sawtooth who’s recently been joining Jim Yeager on stage at the Public House in Quechee. She sees karaoke as “a great, fun training ground for somebody who has intentions to be a professional.”

Others are drawn to the event’s low-stakes environment, among them recent Hanover High School graduate Jenny Davis from Norwich. At school, Davis was part of the competitive music group Footnotes. At karaoke she’s “a lot less nervous and I feel able to just do my thing and be calm.”

Then there are those who are there to let loose. A man in his late 30s who uses the pseudonym Wolfman turned Bad Company’s “Live for the Music” into more of a shout than a song. He whipped across the stage and waved the mic like a prop. The cord twisted behind him. It shimmied with the long braid that emerged from under his trucker hat.

Around 10, Morgan Turgeon, the bartender working that night, dashed from behind the bar to sing the Noah Kahan hit “Dial Drunk.” She seemed a little nervous at first and kept her eyes locked on the lyrics, but by the song’s end she was on the lip of the stage, projecting straight to the audience as people clapped and sang along.

At that point in the night, the energy started to shift. The air around the stage began to heat up as more people congregated to dance. Empty glasses collected on tables. Groups of friends swarmed and blurred into each other like they were catching up at a house party a few songs away from its peak.

Then someone started singing “Believe” by Cher and suddenly everyone was dancing at the front of the stage. When the chorus hit, the singer dangled the mic into the crowd. This was the peak.

It’s hard to put a finger on exactly what it is about karaoke that’s got people so hooked. One regular, 43-year-old Mike Cannon, a producer at Junction Arts and Media in White River Junction, described it as church.

Maybe that’s the best summation. At karaoke, people who might never interact elsewhere are thrust together because of a shared urge to express themselves in song. Even the silliest performances contain a grain of sincerity and that sort of feels like the point. As Cannon put it, during karaoke “the irony fades away.”

“We’ve built a community and it’s really beautiful,” Diaz commented earlier in the night.

It turns out that in a couple days Flo Gourlaouen, one of the singers who performed that night, would be heading back to his home in France. He’d been coming to karaoke for almost a year while studying at Dartmouth.

“I never thought I’d find another family here,” he announced to the crowd before one of his songs.

At the end of the night all the regulars clambered on stage to serenade him. “We can’t help falling in love with Flo,” they sang, modifying the words to the old Elvis song. It was almost 11, and the rest of the restaurant was nearly vacant. There was no crowd to witness the heartfelt moment, but that didn’t seem important. Everyone who should have been there was already singing.

Sawtooth Kitchen hosts karaoke at 8 p.m. on Tuesdays. Admission is free. More information can be found at sawtoothkitchen.com

Marion Umpleby is a freelance writer. She lives in Tunbridge.