Review: Dawn Landes at The Grey Eagle
From the way Dawn Landes described it, her two previous appearances at The Grey Eagle may have looked and sounded a bit different than her June 21 performance. For example, a hula hooper was onstage, along with frequent bandmate Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman) and a drum kit. “Last time, it was in a more punk-rock setting,” she said, laughing.
And given the spirited indie-folk on albums like Fireproof and Straight Lines EP, both released in 2008, and Sweetheart Rodeo from 2010, a bit of a boisterous atmosphere is easy to imagine.
But at this performance, to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of her fourth album, the sublime, understated Bluebird, it was just Landes with her guitar in the spotlight, plus husband Creighton Irons off to the side on the keys, playing an intimate show for a seated group of about 50 fans. Standing at the microphone in a long red dress, Landes radiated both torch singer grace and down-home humbleness as she revisited the album’s 10 tracks.
The songs on Bluebird are soft, restrained, and pastoral, eschewing embellishments to lay bare the elegance of Landes’ voice. They are often tender, sentimental, and sad, coming on the heels of the breakup of her first marriage. But it’s also where you can hear Landes look around with her songwriter’s eye and begin to find herself again, and with that record, she struck a chord that earned it the Independent Music Awards’ Folk/Singer-Songwriter Album of the Year Award in 2014.
Throughout the show, Landes wove a bit of anecdote here and there, letting her charm and even a bit of goofiness show through, fessing up to the clumsiness of relearning some of the tunes. But mostly she let her lyrics do the talking, opening with the assured finger picking and daydreamy contemplation of Bluebird’s title track, her silvery voice bouncing and darting like the song’s subject.
On the next song, the magnetic “Try to Make a Fire Burn Again,” Landes’ penchant for writing and singing folk and country truly emerged. With its fleeting, teetering chorus, Landes showed the confidence and emotion in her voice as she switched back and forth between breathy near whispers and vocal rises. Her ability to drift into Americana while keeping her feet firmly planted in folk singing was also apparent on the moseying stride of “Cry No More.”
Both of those songs would have been enough to warrant more exploration into Landes’ catalog, but she also trekked into some deeper woods with “Oh Brother,” featuring keyboard flourishes by Irons in place of the backup singing by collaborator Norah Jones that appears on the album.
Bluebird is a self-contained collection of songs — they all sound like they exist on the same point in Landes’ timeline. But each song seems to project a different facet of a thought, as Landes turns it around in her head. In the reunion portrayed in “Bloodhound,” with its undulating guitar slides, or in the solitude of recovering her steps in “Heel Toe,” these songs are thoughts that pass through the mind of someone spending time, in reflection, on her own. So it’s hard to imagine a better way to hear them than with the stripped down yet elegant performance Landes provided.
Wrapping up the songs from Bluebird, Landes moved into playing a few older numbers — i.e. turn of the 20th century old — which she said she pulled from a source titled “The Women’s Liberation Songbook.” Women’s empowerment is a theme Landes has dedicated several songs in her catalog to, and she said she’s hoping to revive the old tunes from the songbook into a kind of stage performance, complete with costumes and multiple participants.
And so the next time we see her, it may be back to the onstage spectacles she hinted to at the beginning of her show — even if there isn’t another hula hooper. And for sure there is much more to watch for from Dawn Landes, but it was a treat to see her do her thing in such a personal light.
(Photos by Bryce Lafoon)
