50 Foot WaveMon 23 Nov – Ingrid Michaelson, Greg Laswell
I hadn't heard anything by Greg Laswell before seeing him listed as support for this gig. I did manage to find time to listen to a couple of tracks though. Kudos to him for choosing to cover
Your Ghost by Kristin Hersh but personally I don't think it worked for him. That's not meant as an insult, after all Kristin re-worked it herself as a 50 Foot Wave song and I think the same about that effort too. The other song was What a Day which features the lines "What a day to be alive, what a day to realize I'm not dead". It's not a bad song and the lyrics made me think that perhaps he was a good match for Ingrid. They aren't out-and-out pessimists, but there's a dark undercurrent to their lyrics which, I think at least, lifts them to a higher level.
I arrived at the gig half an hour after the doors alleged opening time to find them shut with around three to four hundred people waiting outside. There was time, I felt, for a strategic pint before joining the queue. When I got back forty-five minutes later, the doors were open but the queue was still the same length. I know they wanted to check bags and the like, but that's just terrible organisation. Unsurprisingly, Greg was halfway through his set by the time I gained entry. He's a disgustingly handsome, witty man who fortunately has a self-deprecating sense of humour or else the poor tatters of my self esteem would never have survived being in the same room as him. That said, he was wearing a woolly hat, I should probably call it a beanie but still, which looked just the one that Benny from Crossroads used to wear. Bask in the glory of the perfect barbed comment... even in the unlikely event that Greg ever sees this review, being a youthful American he won't quite know how bad an insult that is.
Perhaps partly due to Greg's presence, but also because of the nature of Ingrid's music, there was a distinctly feminine cheer when she made it on to the stage. Although there were more guys present than at the Indigo Girls gig I went to (which unfortunately meant the usual obscurred view), the women here seemed slightly more raucous, more out to have fun. As it turned out, when Ingrid thought to ask how many Americans were present, it was a sizable minority - perhaps as many as a third. This had a good effect in that it helped break down some of that British reserve, yet the crowd retained the intensity that we Brits can bring. Ingrid sensed that liveliness early on and soon put us all to work singing parts of her songs. In fact, for The Chain, she recruited one audience member to come up on stage and sing the third part.
Ingrid didn't bring the band on the tour, just her friend Allie Moss (you can see how well this setup works here http://www.livedaily.com/sessions/41.html, which used to be available in the UK, but sadly not now... if any Europeans desperately want to see it, let me know and I'll see if I can host it somewhere).
I mentioned the dark undercurrent to Ingrid's music earlier, you can hear it in songs likeMasochist or Die Alone. Even her 'happy' songs like The Way I Am take on a darker hue when, as she did during the gig, she tells you that when she wrote it she was alone, that this is a song of heartfelt yearning rather than one of celebrating love. Sometimes though, she's just dark accidentally, like when she sang "light drains and darkness will come again" instead of "darkness drains and light will come again" during the song Everybody. When she realised what she'd done, she stopped song with a cry of "Oh no!" and then sang it again correctly just in case it came to be a bad omen. We seem to have gotten away with it so far...
One of her encore songs was Radiohead's Creep. Now I'm fairly protective of this song, unless you can sing it with at the same sense of alienation and loss as Thom Yorke then you really shouldn't bother (and let's face it, you're going to struggle to match him on that score). In fact the only cover I can listen to is the one where someone has taken the voice synth used in Fitter, Happier (aka Fred) and used that... it works surprisingly well. But I'll let Ingrid off on this one, I don't think I want to listen to a recording of it, but hearing her sing that at the end was great. I do believe that she's been there and can genuinely sing it from the heart and although I wish her happier times, it's that experience that makes her the wonderful songwriter that she is.
I hadn't heard anything by Greg Laswell before seeing him listed as support for this gig. I did manage to find time to listen to a couple of tracks though. Kudos to him for choosing to cover
Your Ghost by Kristin Hersh but personally I don't think it worked for him. That's not meant as an insult, after all Kristin re-worked it herself as a 50 Foot Wave song and I think the same about that effort too. The other song was What a Day which features the lines "What a day to be alive, what a day to realize I'm not dead". It's not a bad song and the lyrics made me think that perhaps he was a good match for Ingrid. They aren't out-and-out pessimists, but there's a dark undercurrent to their lyrics which, I think at least, lifts them to a higher level.I arrived at the gig half an hour after the doors alleged opening time to find them shut with around three to four hundred people waiting outside. There was time, I felt, for a strategic pint before joining the queue. When I got back forty-five minutes later, the doors were open but the queue was still the same length. I know they wanted to check bags and the like, but that's just terrible organisation. Unsurprisingly, Greg was halfway through his set by the time I gained entry. He's a disgustingly handsome, witty man who fortunately has a self-deprecating sense of humour or else the poor tatters of my self esteem would never have survived being in the same room as him. That said, he was wearing a woolly hat, I should probably call it a beanie but still, which looked just the one that Benny from Crossroads used to wear. Bask in the glory of the perfect barbed comment... even in the unlikely event that Greg ever sees this review, being a youthful American he won't quite know how bad an insult that is.
Perhaps partly due to Greg's presence, but also because of the nature of Ingrid's music, there was a distinctly feminine cheer when she made it on to the stage. Although there were more guys present than at the Indigo Girls gig I went to (which unfortunately meant the usual obscurred view), the women here seemed slightly more raucous, more out to have fun. As it turned out, when Ingrid thought to ask how many Americans were present, it was a sizable minority - perhaps as many as a third. This had a good effect in that it helped break down some of that British reserve, yet the crowd retained the intensity that we Brits can bring. Ingrid sensed that liveliness early on and soon put us all to work singing parts of her songs. In fact, for The Chain, she recruited one audience member to come up on stage and sing the third part.
Ingrid didn't bring the band on the tour, just her friend Allie Moss (you can see how well this setup works here http://www.livedaily.com/sessions/41.html, which used to be available in the UK, but sadly not now... if any Europeans desperately want to see it, let me know and I'll see if I can host it somewhere).
I mentioned the dark undercurrent to Ingrid's music earlier, you can hear it in songs like
Masochist or Die Alone. Even her 'happy' songs like The Way I Am take on a darker hue when, as she did during the gig, she tells you that when she wrote it she was alone, that this is a song of heartfelt yearning rather than one of celebrating love. Sometimes though, she's just dark accidentally, like when she sang "light drains and darkness will come again" instead of "darkness drains and light will come again" during the song Everybody. When she realised what she'd done, she stopped song with a cry of "Oh no!" and then sang it again correctly just in case it came to be a bad omen. We seem to have gotten away with it so far...One of her encore songs was Radiohead's Creep. Now I'm fairly protective of this song, unless you can sing it with at the same sense of alienation and loss as Thom Yorke then you really shouldn't bother (and let's face it, you're going to struggle to match him on that score). In fact the only cover I can listen to is the one where someone has taken the voice synth used in Fitter, Happier (aka Fred) and used that... it works surprisingly well. But I'll let Ingrid off on this one, I don't think I want to listen to a recording of it, but hearing her sing that at the end was great. I do believe that she's been there and can genuinely sing it from the heart and although I wish her happier times, it's that experience that makes her the wonderful songwriter that she is.
