Last week when Amy got back from church, she asked me if Carrie Newcomer was someone whose music I enjoyed. There is a song of hers, “These Are The Moments,” on a Monumental Mix CD I picked up for a buck once at Back Home Indiana, which used to be an Indiana themed store on the first floor of Circle Centre, but which has since gone belly-up. Besides that, I have heard a number of her other songs, and she has for a long time been one of my favorite local artists.
I have always heard her referred to as a local artist, though I had not previously known exactly what that meant. During her brief introduction at the concert tonight at Irvington United Methodist Church, the woman who introduced her said that Carrie had been born in Elkhart but now lives “out in the woods” down in Bloomington. I knew that she made appearances in Indianapolis from time to time - most notably each year at the Spirit & Place Festival.
(As an aside, Spirit & Place is for sure the best festival of any kind that we have going on here in Indianapolis - take a look at their web site to see just how much there is to do with this festival during the first half of November each year.)
From looking at her schedule on her web site, though, it was always hard to tell just where she might be from - unlike a lot of artists referred to as local, she only pops up on the local radar from time to time, and her schedule is always full of appearances in cities all over the country. I was always under the impression that she had perhaps been born around here, but that she had long since called other environs home. This is not so, apparently - and so much the better. We need more thoughtful, liberal people like Carrie Newcomer around these parts.
Amy then informed me that Carrie was going to play a concert at the church on Saturday, August 4th. This was in enough time for me to ask off for that day, but I managed not to do that - and then got the day off anyway. So at a quarter after seven this evening, we set off - and I was hoping that there would be records on sale, because I’ve wanted to add some Carrie Newcomer records to my CD library, but have in the past quailed at the inflated prices Borders charges for them.
The concert was in the sanctuary, and there was a little table set up outside the sanctuary with - sure enough! - CDs and a new DVD. I picked up her most recent record, Regulars And Refugees, and was paying for it when someone off to my right took notice of Jackson and said what long, delicate little fingers he had. Turns out it was Carrie herself, oohing and aahing over our little kid.
There were something like fifty to one hundred people in attendance by the time she put on one of her guitars and started playing, and she was, in a word, amazing. If you haven’t heard any of her music, then you should know that Carrie Newcomer is a folk singer with a spiritual - though not precisely religious - bent. She was unaccompanied tonight, just herself and two acoustic guitars that she plays masterfully.
A righty, she was plucking with all five fingers of her right hand on most songs and dancing all along the fret board with her left - both in front of and behind the capos, three of which she had clipped to the headstock and two of which were attached to the fret board for almost all of the songs. Not that I’ve seen all the much in the way of live music, especially up close enough that I could really watch the guitar player’s hands (something I have been fascinated with since I started playing guitar myself), but I had never before seen someone use more than one capo at a time, and I had also never seen someone fret behind a capo.
Her voice is just as amazing as her guitar work - she has a voice like melted chocolate, incredible range, and remarkable tone and volume control. She’s also quite a bit more playful than I had previously thought - all of her songs that I had heard before had something of a serious tone, and the workshops and other things on her schedule led me to believe that she was one of those very serious musicians who was maybe a bit dark, a bit haunted by life. Again, not so. One of her songs opened with a bit about Jesus driving an El Camino (and then went on to say something about Jesus and Buddha pulling into a Starbucks), and another song was a sing-song sort of thing that rattled off all kinds of different names for groupings of animals - a parliament of owl, a murder of crow, that sort of thing.
She even got in one little political dig, when she was talking before one of the songs about how we as people sometimes waste time and resources on things that don’t really need doing, “like I-69.” She grinned mischievously and chuckled softly, but didn’t really get the laugh it looked like she had been hoping for. I missed the timing, only thinking after the fact that I should have given her a soft bit of clapping from where I sat near the back of the crowd. Probably there weren’t too many enviro-hippies in attendance tonight, but I was sitting there in a green t-shirt with the peace sign on it. Oh well...
After the show, I bought a second CD, her 2000 release called The Age Of Possibility. The link to her web site is up there at the top of this post, and you can also check out her record label at Rounder Records. (That record label is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Know anything about it, Jason?)
That’s pretty much all I have for now. August is clearly coming in like a lion here in the Blog-O-Rama. I wonder how long that will last...
No comments:
Post a Comment