Shawn Colvin & Friends at City Winery
Apr. 7th, 2016 04:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroI’ve gotten a concert bug lately, and this was the first of several we have tickets for. It’s nice to be able to take an evening and go see a band or a singer, particularly one I’ve liked since I was 15. This is less a review and more a collection of rambling thoughts about the concert.
The opening act was Lucy Wainwright (daughter of Loudon, sister of Rufus). She was a hoot. Her schtick is having the audience ask her questions, and then either giving amusingly curt answers or using them as lead-ins to stories or songs. The fact that her entire family is made up of professional musicians turned into a story about her five-year-old niece, who when told that it was time for Aunt Lucy to stop singing and maybe she could sing herself to sleep, replied, “Fine, but I’m going to make up a song about sad humans!” “Welcome to the family, kid.”
Also, apparently they hated her in Lithuania but love basketball, so she was able to salvage a performance by doing a sing-alone of “Everybody’s Got a Hungry Heart” by changing it to “Everybody’s Got a Basketball.”
We bought her CDs. They were two for one, by which we mean “two CDs for one twenty-dollar bill.”
Shawn Colvin is 60, and while her eyes and memory might be going and she’s losing a bit of her upper register (she’s always been a solid alto—I can belt a few of her songs, and do most of them in covered tone), her hands are still amazing. I didn’t actually realize how amazing until I saw her live, because things that I thought were multiple guitars on recordings, it turns out, are just her being awesome. She has a separate tuning for every song she plays so she can sound like a multi-track recording on a single acoustic guitar.
If anyone was wondering about the true meaning of “Sunny Came Home,” she describes it as both “the ultimate breakup song” (as most of her songs are breakup songs) and as a “murder ballad”.
Colvin did a set by herself, then a few songs with her longtime friend and once-partner Lucy Kaplansky (who I was underwhelmed by, though some of that was song choices), then an encore with Steve Earle (who her next album is a collaboration with, and who I thought was generally good but, again, none of the songs leapt out at me).
If I had chosen the setlist, I would have included more of my favorites (“Round of Blues,” “Fill Me Up,” “I’ll Say I’m Sorry Now,” “Climb On (A Back That's Strong),” “Object of My Affection”) though hearing “Trouble” live was absolutely glorious, as was “Diamond in the Rough.” And man, was this a perfect venue for her: Just large enough to still feel intime and with an enthusiastic crowd.
And I did have the thought, halfway through “Polaroids”, that a bunch of Colvin’s songs walk that fine line between expressive poetry and word salad. And the ones with clearer stories to them are often the ones I like the most.
Overall: A++ Would Concert Again.
The opening act was Lucy Wainwright (daughter of Loudon, sister of Rufus). She was a hoot. Her schtick is having the audience ask her questions, and then either giving amusingly curt answers or using them as lead-ins to stories or songs. The fact that her entire family is made up of professional musicians turned into a story about her five-year-old niece, who when told that it was time for Aunt Lucy to stop singing and maybe she could sing herself to sleep, replied, “Fine, but I’m going to make up a song about sad humans!” “Welcome to the family, kid.”
Also, apparently they hated her in Lithuania but love basketball, so she was able to salvage a performance by doing a sing-alone of “Everybody’s Got a Hungry Heart” by changing it to “Everybody’s Got a Basketball.”
We bought her CDs. They were two for one, by which we mean “two CDs for one twenty-dollar bill.”
Shawn Colvin is 60, and while her eyes and memory might be going and she’s losing a bit of her upper register (she’s always been a solid alto—I can belt a few of her songs, and do most of them in covered tone), her hands are still amazing. I didn’t actually realize how amazing until I saw her live, because things that I thought were multiple guitars on recordings, it turns out, are just her being awesome. She has a separate tuning for every song she plays so she can sound like a multi-track recording on a single acoustic guitar.
If anyone was wondering about the true meaning of “Sunny Came Home,” she describes it as both “the ultimate breakup song” (as most of her songs are breakup songs) and as a “murder ballad”.
Colvin did a set by herself, then a few songs with her longtime friend and once-partner Lucy Kaplansky (who I was underwhelmed by, though some of that was song choices), then an encore with Steve Earle (who her next album is a collaboration with, and who I thought was generally good but, again, none of the songs leapt out at me).
If I had chosen the setlist, I would have included more of my favorites (“Round of Blues,” “Fill Me Up,” “I’ll Say I’m Sorry Now,” “Climb On (A Back That's Strong),” “Object of My Affection”) though hearing “Trouble” live was absolutely glorious, as was “Diamond in the Rough.” And man, was this a perfect venue for her: Just large enough to still feel intime and with an enthusiastic crowd.
And I did have the thought, halfway through “Polaroids”, that a bunch of Colvin’s songs walk that fine line between expressive poetry and word salad. And the ones with clearer stories to them are often the ones I like the most.
Overall: A++ Would Concert Again.
