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January 24, 2007
TT: Small package
I just got back from Joe’s Pub, where I saw the front end of a two-nighter by Erin McKeown. She’s touring in support of her new CD, Sing You Sinners, about which I recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal:Ms. McKeown, one of the freshest singer-songwriters of her generation, has chosen this time around to cut an album of standards. What sets it apart from the superficially similar efforts of such aging rock stars as Linda Ronstadt and Rod Stewart is that Ms. McKeown isn’t recycling the smooth sounds of yesteryear. Instead, she sings “Something’s Gotta Give” and “Just One of Those Things” as if she’d written them herself, performing them in the casual, slightly rough-hewn style of her previous albums, We Will Become Like Birds and Grand. The effect is both arrestingly personal and utterly contemporary…
All true, and I can’t recommend Sing You Sinners strongly enough—yet now that I’ve seen McKeown perform, I understand why Our Girl swears that you haven’t really heard her until you hear her in person. She’s amazing on stage, focused and charismatic, and her backup musicians, who suggest by turns a rockabilly combo, a jump band, and a power trio, are no less impressive. She’s also a charmer, a five-foot-nothing cutie with a sunshiny smile who obviously loves nothing better than singing in front of a crowd. (It tickled me that she was wearing a pinstriped suit, which made her look like she was auditioning to play the Master of Ceremonies in a big-budget high-school production of Cabaret.)
One of the many things that impressed me about tonight’s gig was the unforced ease with which McKeown moved from familiar standards like “Get Happy” and “Rhode Island Is Famous for You” to her own songs, making everything she sang seem all of a piece. I brought one of my twentysomething friends along, and she was knocked out by McKeown’s originals. “She’s so literate,” my friend said, and I agreed wholeheartedly. I rank her right up there with Jonatha Brooke, than which there is no higher praise.
From New York McKeown and her band head down to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. (where she’ll be taping an All Things Considered segment). You’ll find the rest of their itinerary here. Go, and tell her OGIC and I sent you.
Posted January 24, 2007 12:00 PM
