Flashes of Panic

I saw notes, when I was ordering tickets for Erin McKeown’s show last night at Brandeis University, that the show would be “all-request”, but I didn’t really know what that meant. (Not quite the same as old days?)

It turned out that it meant a student walking around the lobby before the show with slips of paper and two pitchers marked “Songs” and “Questions”. There were signs on the wall saying, “Deep cuts? Burning questions? Ask!” I wrote down the song that hooked me on McKeown five years ago: “Blackbirds—I saw you play it at the Academy of Music on New Year’s Eve, 2001, and it was great” and put that in the “Songs” pitcher.

The auditorium was surprisingly empty—maybe five rows filled in the front, plus a dozen or so other people scattered through the hall—and eerily quiet if the applause faded. I was surprised the crowd wasn’t bigger; I wonder if Brandeis doesn’t “get the word out” like the venues crawled by Tourfilter do.

McKeown has toured with what she calls a “little big band” recently, but last night it was just her, two guitars, and the recital-hall piano. She favors Gretsch behemoths, making for a “little woman with huge guitar” effect, but it’s less like tool-too-big than that her own skill and talent with the instrument seems to require that much material to play with.

She walked on with the two pitchers and just started pulling slips out, a few from “Songs,” a few from “Questions,” and she’d play them as they came. She opened up with “Cosmopolitans” from “Grand,” and I continued to be impressed through the night at how well she could take a fully-instrumented album piece like “Cosmopolitan” or “Cinematic” (which would work well with Josh Ritter’s horn section) and do it well with just herself and the guitar. She started commenting on how the songs came out: “Normally I would close with this song, it’s interesting that it’s coming up second,” or “It’s cool that these two songs [“Queen of Quiet” and “Cinematic”] came up together, because they’re both opening tracks on their albums.”

The questions were a little more offbeat, particularly coming from a university crowd. “What is your favorite piece of furniture?” “What did you want to be when you were five?” (McKeown used that to segue into the title track from her fourth album, “We Will Become Like Birds.”) “Who is your favorite classical composer?” (That became an introduction to “Vera”, a back-story I hadn’t known.) Eventually there was a litter of paper around her feet, she’d faked her way through “Blue Skies” and the opening verse of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” (among others); I was half expecting either “Purple Haze” or “Tiny Dancer” to come up. She did this without a fake book, entirely from her memory of what the song sounded like.

And yes, she did play “Blackbirds,” and judging by the reaction, I wasn’t the only one who requested it.

It was a really good show, and I’m surprised there weren’t more people there.

Now Playing: Cosmopolitans from Grand by Erin McKeown

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