music
With all the excitement surrounding the return of Bob Dylan to Charlottesville, it’s easy to forget that his foundation—straight-ahead folk music—has been largely banished to the shadows. New folk singer-songwriters, awash not in Dylan’s resplendent history, must scrape together bits of acclaim here and there. Lord, they might as well be poets or intellectual novelists.
Who puts the “lounge” in Gravity Lounge? It’s Anais Mitchell, who delivered an intimate set to an equally intimate crowd on Tuesday night.
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Well, at least the foundation is still alive. And in the case of the new women folkies, blood is seriously flowing. Antje Duvekot tops some people’s lists, and many others stand out, such as Kris Delmhorst, Meg Hutchinson, Miranda Stone, Lizanne Knott—and Vermonter Anais Mitchell, who performed a gorgeous set for a sparse audience at Gravity Lounge last week.
That audience likely fell into two camps: those who had been exposed to the baritone sax riffs and other high-production elements (roughly akin to Ani DiFranco’s recent concoctions) sprinkled throughout Mitchell’s 2007 Righteous Babe Records release, The Brightness, and those who had no other experience of Mitchell but as a woman with a guitar on a raw stage—the foundation’s foundation, so to speak.
Make that a woman with a guitar and a man with a guitar: Michael Chorney, who produced The Brightness as well as—with less extracurricular fireworks—Mitchell’s first album, Hymns for the Exiled for the lesser-known folk label, Waterbug. His ear for adding subtle and befitting textures to sometimes traditional/sometimes innovative rhythms was on display in Mitchell originals such as “Your Fonder Heart” and “Shenandoah.”
Mitchell has played for much larger audiences, but it’s clear she’s comfortable with pouring her heart out to coffee house-sized samplings of people, and working hard to engage them. Asking the audience for some local news and hearing about the drought prompted her to move up on her playlist her take on Hurricane Katrina, “Out of Pawn.” The song is just one example of the way she extends that famous singer-songwriter angst outward toward the concrete world without overreaching into hollow objectivity. It was hard to tell at several points in the set what was our world and what was her creation. In a live setting even more so than in her recordings, such conscious artifice seemed to flesh out the natural power in the uncommon timbre of her voice—almost a female version of a Neil Young effect.
Private concerts by Neil or Bob—that’s what public concerts of great folk music are often like these days. More than a little bitter. Though very sweet.