Author Archives: Roger Catlin

Somebody has been stepping it up at The Kennedy Center Millennium Stage this summer. The free daily showcase that once reliably booked out-of-town college and high school ensembles has suddenly seen performers that include Alejandro Escovado, Chris Smither, Hurray for the Riff Raff on its stages.

Later, it had Margo Price, in a show that was for some reason elevated from the usual lobby stage to its third floor Terrace Theatre, which still fit the crowd. For the occasion, the ace country singer and songwriter was joined by her husband Jeremy Ivey for a strong 12-song acoustic set that was quite a departure from her usual band tour—and further still from the expansive cosmo rock explosion of her latest album Strays.

But the sparse presentation brought extra focus to the breathtaking (and true) autobiographical song from her Midwest Farmer’s Daughter that started the show, “Hands of Time.” It’s a country song that has everything—daddy losing the farm, her losing a baby, left turns with men and drink, a bit of hope at the end—and largely introduced the world to Price’s considerable talents.

Chagrined at first by the setting and the hushed audience, she joked “I’m shocked they let us into such a nice establishment. I had to dig through the suitcase for proper clothes.” With the freedom to play a lot of songs they usually don’t, it was a surprising set that included one of the songs she wrote with Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers while dodging wildfires in Topanga Canyon, “Malibu.”

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PHOTOS: LAURA CROSTA | Fans call the week or so between Jerry Garcia’s August 1 birthday and the commemoration of the day he died (August 9, 1995) the “Days Between,” after a philosophical early ’90s Grateful Dead song. In recent years the annual occasion has been marked the Hamilton in DC with a series of shows from different Dead-adjacent acts, which this year included the realms of bluegrass or jazz.

It culminated Sunday with a set from Joan Osborne, who has no little Dead cred. She’s lent after her voice to the post-Garcia aggregation The Dead and tours with Phil Lesh and Friends and has long since been embraced by the fan community, who treated her show as a kind of offshoot, with all the tie-dye and taping stations that engenders.

Even with a new album due out September 8, she said this would be “a different show” with more Jerry than usual, and there were five Dead related songs in the evening—fully a third of the set. That compared to just a pair from her new album, from the opening “Should’ve Danced More” to the title track “Nobody Owns You,” the former a note to herself; the latter a note to her daughter.

Osborne had an unusual band but an effective one. John Petruzzelli, a guitarist who has worked with Rufus Wainwright, Ian Hunter, Patti Smith, and the ace Beatles cover band the Fab Faux had a thankless task—to help conjure the memory of Garcia without seeming to ape him, and he succeeded with a nice reserved style. The other backing musician, Texan Will Bryant, filled in solidly on electric keyboards, but was even better on the Hamilton’s grand piano, adding tasty solos and trading licks with Petruzzelli.

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PHOTOS: RACHEL LANGE | Wolf Trap, the National Park-run concert space in the Virginia woods, has a big enough stage to accommodate full symphony orchestras and ballet productions. Touring rock bands typically fill it with equipment and lights.

So it is a bit surprising to see Regina Spektor solo at a grand piano and otherwise empty stage captivate an audience in a way bigger productions often don’t. As playful and surprising with her voice as she is with her precise, ringing piano playing, she was one compelling performer with a rack of disarming songs happy to take their own unique lyric turns.

She began with even less than a piano, standing to sing “Ain’t No Cover” a cappella with a drum pattern beat out by a spare pinky on the same microphone. Only then did she sit at the suitably grand instrument for her beguiling show.

Spektor said at times she was rattled by the sheer beauty of the venue; she cracked that she’d be more comfortable in a dark, divey club. She seems far from those days, though. And her silvery many tiered gown would have been out of place. At Wolf Trap, it looked a little weird at first too, but as the show went on it was easy to see how well it reflected the changing colored lights above her—she was a one woman light show too.

At the piano she began with her grand, complainy seasonal song “Summer in the City” (“Cleavage! Cleavage! Cleavage!”) and followed it with a summer out look that was “less of a bummer, “Folding Chair.” She pounded tunes that had bits of gospel in them, like “Becoming All Alone,” from her latest collection “Home, Before and After”; or played like clever, brash show tunes, like “Baby Jesus.” Even songs that began like straight pop love songs, like “How” but had room for left turns.

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PHOTOS: RACHEL LANGE | Jason Isbell’s summer tour with The 400 Unit began with some brash urgency on a splendid night at Wolf Trap in Vienna, VA. With a slightly retooled band and a terrific new album, Weathervanes, he was there to present a lot of it—nine of its 13 tracks, all told. 

And they’re a pretty strong set of songs, full of quirky characters in specific locations, playing out their fates in songs that don’t worry about changing directions midway. He’s been shuffling in the new songs with old favorites and scrambling the order nightly. It’s tempting to think he started with “Save the World”—with its heartbreaking message of a world where parents are frightened for their children because of the exploding gun violence—for a DC adjacent audience in hopes of nudging some action to the issue.

But the show stayed on the same intense level with another arresting tune from Weathervanes, “King of Oklahoma,” about a blue collar character with a crumbling marriage, numbed by possibly addicting prescribed painkillers. Both songs had equal sting from guitar interplay between Isbell, who got his first jobs in rock due to his instrumental prowess, working off another top talent, Sadler Vaden, of another beloved band of Southern rockers Drivin’ N Cryin.’

He’d go ahead and paint other vivid lyrical pictures in songs like “Strawberry Woman” and “White Beretta” but in between wove in poignant songs of his own lonely upbringing, “Dreamsicle” and his anthem to his home state, “Alabama Pines.”

Noting this year’s 10-year anniversary of his solo breakthrough Southeastern, which he hinted he would commemorate properly later this year, Isbell offered its wistful song of homesickness “Stockholm” and interrupted the planned set for a beautiful acoustic guitar and piano reading of the arresting “Elephant,” the song about a friend’s cancer that was so raw and real one wondered why anyone else hadn’t accomplished such a feat on the subject.

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Rock ’n’ roll is a sound and it is a style, and Tav Falco’s been straddling both since the late 1970s.

The latest version of Tav Falco’s Panther Burns, on a cross country tour, stopped at The Runaway in DC for a midweek show that was strangely mesmerizing and altogether rocking thanks largely to his straight-outta-Rome backing trio led by Mario Monterosso. At 77, Falco doesn’t look all that different than he did when Alex Chilton joined forces with him to form Panther Burns back in Memphis. Minus his pencil mustache, he’s maintained his black pompadour, and certainly his style.

With only a subtle croon, he does a lot with his moves, taking the stage with maracas—that forgotten engine of old Bo Diddley songs—before slowly putting on his Hofner guitar to add rhythm to the stinging lead that Monterosso had already nailed down (the length of time it took him to get the guitar over his head and adjusted was the only giveaway to his advancing age).

There’s a lot to be said about the guy’s taste. Panther Burns got its name after a legendary cat set afire on a Southern plantation, and the band has similarly mined the swampy and mysterious sounds of the American South for its inspiration.

There was so much ground to cover, Falco played exactly nothing from his latest release, the 2021 EP “Club Car Zodiac” on ORG Music. Instead he dived into his story about a New Orleans voodoo queen and his version of the classic bolero “Sway” before the somewhat surprising, straight ahead version of the Honeycombs’ 1964 chart topper “Have I the Right?” with a 1-2-3-4 countdown right from the Ramones. Then, as if another inspired turn of a jukebox, over to the 1950s country standard “He’ll Have to Go,” before his own throbbing tune of existential anguish, as he described it, “Born Too Late.”

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The Decemberists, the charming chamber folk-rock band from out of Portlandia, became famous for live performances as elaborate and detailed as their ornate songs, staging obscure battles or sea scenes with sudden appearances by man-eating whales into their shows.

There was none of that Wednesday as the band took the stage at Wolf Trap in Virginia, two years after they were originally supposed to play there, during the time when everything disappeared. The title of the current excursion, “Arise from the Bunkers! 2022” was just about the most florid part of the tour. It was enough to be present, at long last, alive and performing before thousands of fans in the Virginia woods, even as they have given up for now the costumed accessories or even the notion of promoting any particular release — I’ll Be Your Girl, their eighth full length album, came out a full four years ago now.

But certainly the audience had no complaints about their straightforward approach to their solid, 17-song, 105 minute show. The band has been sprinkling its sets this summer with selections from throughout its career (though sadly, nothing from 2015’s What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World). “Hope you like the old ones,” said frontman Colin Meloy, as keyboardist Jenny Conlee strapped on her accordion and Chris Funk sat down to the pedal steel guitar for “Shiny,” the oldest song from their repertoire, from an an album that was mostly demos before they had a full recording contract. They followed it, though, with a new song, about meeting someone at a burial ground.

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It’s gratifying to have any Elvis Costello concert come around after two years of pandemic postponements. But the one that finally took the stage at Wolf Trap in Virginia last week had the added advantage of being opened by Nick Lowe, his longtime colleague, producer, and influencer.

It was a version of “Surrender to the Rhythm” originated by Lowe’s old band Brinsley Schwarz that was playing as Costello appeared on stage. Costello’s version came on his latest recording, marking 50 years since he and a friend recording under the name Rusty tried to release a record of such covers they did at the time.

Costello told a story about approaching Lowe back then as fans and hopefuls and being shooed off. Eventually Lowe would produce six Costello albums, play bass on a dozen of his songs, and otherwise cross paths through the years.

It was Lowe’s ringing “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace Love and Understanding?” that was the climax of the rewarding show with the two trading its memorable, ever-timely verses. Lowe had come back on stage (in a third dashing outfit) to duet on “Indoor Fireworks,” a Costello song that Lowe had released a year before its author did on The King of America. Frankly their harmonies weren’t great, but it was almost touching to see the two together on stage making an effort.

Costello’s headlining set was a freewheeling one for the huge crowd (who looked to be averaging the singer’s age, which turns 68 this week). As such, they wanted to hear songs that ignited his aggressively creative career. They were rewarded with the frequent concert-starter “Accidents will Happen” (likely because of its irresistible opening line, “I just don’t know where to begin”). But also “Green Shirt” and, before long, “Mystery Dance.” In between, he’d fit in songs from this century that few seemed very familiar with, such as “Hetty O’Hara’s Confidential” and “Either Side of the Same Town.”

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Nicole Atkins is the kind of performer who is not only bursting with song ideas, she could also go any number of directions in her musical approach, from folk and pop to soul and rock with a little jazz thrown in as well. During the pandemic, she released a jazzy version of her previous Italian Ice as a way to serve fans and keep her career alive when the pandemic prevented touring.

There was a grand piano on the stage at The Hamilton in Washington, DC, where she concluded her latest tour last weekend, but its cover stayed on it; Atkins preferred to rock out the songs’ original versions with her four-piece band, augmented by the occasional backing vocals of Levi, who also served as opening act.

The tiny and mightily-voiced Atkins brings Lea Michele to mind, and if that singer ever tires of her recently announced gig fronting Broadway’s revival of Funny Girl, this versatile vocalist has the spunk and pipes to fulfill it. As if to remind us, she made sure to mention at the end of one of her songs, “AM Gold,” that it had a Barbra Streisand reference in its refrain, “People needin’ people.” But that’s about as close to pop she got in a set that otherwise moved to harder rock and at one point, dance (“Fire up that disco ball if you can,” she called out before “Domino”).

The Jersey girl opened with a tune named after her hometown there, “Neptune City,” but by the end of the show was was taunting onetime neighbor Southside Johnny, whom she called a grump and is apparently in a competition for creating the better “I Don’t Wanna Go Home” anthem. As such, she capped her “In the Splinters” by calling out, “Eat it, Southside Johnny!”

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PHOTO: LIZ LINDER | Listeners literally place performers on pedestals, onto elevated stages and spotlights. So it was a little shocking to hear Sarah Borges say during her free-wheeling show at the Pearl Street Warehouse last week that she had spent some of the pandemic as a truck driver.

She couldn’t tour, and the clubs were all closed and she needed the dough. So why not? After all, she was pictured on the cover of her 2013 album, Radio Sweetheart, at the wheel of a T Bird. And being a songwriter who is always on the ball, she came up with a song about her part time duties, “She’s a Trucker.”

Whether songs come easily to Borges or not, they are certainly received easily. The Pearl Street show with a solid band led by her guitarist and producer Eric “Roscoe” Ambel, sounded great, had plenty of vigor, and with Borges’ droll delivery between songs, was thoroughly entertaining.

She’s got an enervating wail to her songs that draws you in, and a sassy style that makes everything seem to swing. Her guitar may be as much an accessory as her party dress, but why try soloing when you’ve got an ace like Roscoe in the house?

A member of the Blackhearts for Joan Jett, Ambel went on to co-found the Del-Lords before becoming an all around producer and guitarist for any number of artists from the Bottle Rockets to Emmylou Harris. He’s found a natural home playing with and for Borges though. And, dressed all white from bowler hat and coat to guitar and amp, looking like a tobacco tycoon, he played a few songs from his latest, You Asked for It – The Shut In Singles Series.

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Oftentimes artists will say they’re glad to be at a place. But Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway were clearly delighted to be making their debut at The Birchmere in Alexandria, VA, in between some festival gigs.

This, after all, was a hallowed ground for Mid-Atlantic bluegrass, where generations of stars have performed over the storied club’s half century, and local bluegrass superstars the Seldom Scene established an early residency and has been associated with the place ever since.

Tuttle likely knew The Birchmere name as a child, listening to records and learning flatpicking, cross picking, and clawhammer guitar styles from her music teaching father. Those lessons were successful enough to have her become the first woman to win the International Bluegrass Music Association’s guitar player of the year award five years ago—which she went on to win for a second consecutive year.

Still in her 20s, Tuttle wasn’t yet married to bluegrass traditions. She played in other people’s bands and wrote, sang, and recorded her own original material (as well as playing covers of others). The first time she headlined at The Birchmere, a year ago, she played solo, doing a lot of that material.

But her return to the bluegrass fold with a new album and a similarly accomplished young band made The Birchmere premiere of Tuttle and Golden Highway a special high point—for her and the audience. More than half her set came from the group’s debut album that came out this year, Crooked Tree. And like a traditional bluegrass group, the quintet lined up across the stage and burned through the material while each took their own impressive solos.

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Bundling acts together for summer tours doesn’t just provide entertainment value, it also allows fans of one act to be introduced (or reintroduced) to acts they might otherwise not have bought a ticket for—and being pleasantly surprised as a result.

At first look, the Americana stardom of critics’ favorite Jason Isbell might not need a second act to bolster sales. Indeed, he’s drawn large crowds on his own across the country—including Wolf Trap, just last fall, where this month he was back again for two nights.

Yet for all his success, he hasn’t had a fraction of the radio play, sales, or widespread pop dominance of Sheryl Crow—whose fans in turn may or may not be aware of his deft songs. Sharing a bill on a tremendous summer night at the wooded Virginia venue and showed how much they have in common, with great bands and sharp songwriting.

Fans of Isbell would be reminded how many of Crow’s songs they already knew by heart and may have forgotten; and those who came for her hits were open and fair minded enough to hear what the fuss about Isbell was all about, maybe for the first time.

The double bill was more than a Machiavellian promoters’ idea; the two had worked together on Crow’s last album, Threads, on a remake of Bob Dylan’s “Everything is Broken” that they reproduced on stage, trading verses and guitar licks.

Crow professed to love everything about Isbell’s music and his politics—though that didn’t come up at all from either artist, particularly. Isbell, for his part, said he’d never had a more fun tour than the one with Crow and opener Waxahatchee, which was already winding up after just seven dates up the Atlantic coast. (Really? Never?)

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PHOTO: HOLLIE FERNANDO | Two summers of canceled or delayed concert tours due to Covid has not only resulted in a pent-up desire among music fans to get out and enjoy, but caused a big pile-up of top acts sharing bills in order to fit in all the season’s dates. There’d be no reason that, say, Belle & Sebastian and Japanese Breakfast couldn’t headline their own tours. But here they were together on a splendid outdoor bill at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts in the woods of Virginia on an evening kicked off by the sharp, grooving instrumentals of the London band Los Bitchos.

Belle & Sebastian, for one, was a band so anxious to perform they’ve been picking things from all over their career, doing multiple songs from six different albums in addition to only a couple from their latest, A Bit of Previous, that they had to record at home in Glasgow instead of Los Angeles because of travel restrictions. So giddy did they seem at performing, frontman Stuart Murdoch ended up dancing atop an upright piano at the end of “I’m a Cuckoo.” “How did I get up here?” he wondered at its end.

Every night’s set has been different from the last as they spin through their rich catalog. And as spontaneous as it all seemed, there was a definite plan in action as half its members—there are up to eight on stage this time—moved to different instruments for each selection.

The manic Murdoch served as frontman for nearly every tune, though Sarah Martin and Stevie Jackson each took lead exactly once (not counting Jackson’s impromptu salute to the state with a verse of The Rolling Stones’ “Sweet Virginia”). And while the kaleidoscopic films and projections behind them seemed to fit each song, it was clear that the visuals could accompany just about any song they could try.

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If you didn’t know he was a central figure of the LA punk scene, you’d think John Doe might have leapfrogged straight from the dusty circuit of 1940s country-western. In the inaugural set of The John Doe Folk Trio at Jammin’ Java in Vienna, VA, the lanky entertainer sported a classic cowboy shirt, sang behind a vintage microphone, and strummed a retro-style wooden guitar, backed by a standup bass and a drummer.

His songs, too, told of a yearning of a bygone America, with job struggles, pain, and death. It was the first stop of the tour following the release of his latest effort Fables in a Foreign Land that was borne of the Covid shutdown that also was a throwback to the pandemic of a century ago.

And the songs of the new Fables in a Foreign Land are all consciously set in the 1890s, a time before planes, phones, video, and internet further complicated and blurred life or death issues. But the new set of tunes weren’t so different from the songs he’s put out on his half dozen earlier solo efforts, such that the opening “The Losing Kind” went easily into the new “Never Coming Back” or even “Burning House of Love,” one of four X songs thrown into the setlist.

Behind the electricity and drive, a lot of the fierce, thundering songs of that seminal punk band were super-charged folk songs that fit into the continuity of the American songbook. Some of his new material grew out of fondly remembered songs from his childhood, such that the sagebrush saga of “Sierra Peaks” became the strange milieu of “The Cowboy and the Hot Air Balloon.”

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