“The Starting From Scratch Tour” arrives at Mercury Lounge as a rock/pop set built around Abby Powledge’s songwriting, where personal narrative and stagecraft share equal weight. The room’s scale matters here. Mercury Lounge has long served as a proving ground in New York City’s live-music ecology, a place where new material gets tested in public and scenes quietly take shape. The tour leans into that tradition, treating performance as a document in progress. One clear takeaway: the songs favor detail over spectacle.