The second concert in the Acoustic Café Folk Series had the singer-songwriter regaling an audience of 400 with tales and laid-back, old-timey-hued musical travails.
Justin Townes Earle doesn’t mince words when expressing his opinion, whether skewering mainstream country music (“Artists like Hank Williams did not deserve to have their music destroyed”), critiquing lazy songwriting about love (“It makes me sick”) or describing his policy on taking requests (“I don’t take requests, except for my wife. I’d have to be very in love with you to take a request. It’s definitely not going to happen.”).
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The same might be said for his brutally honest songs, which unfurl convincingly in understated, vintage country fashion, drenched in melancholy with every phrase wielding emotional weight and cut-to-the-bone meaning.
That made Thursday night’s appearance in St. Cecilia Music Center’s Acoustic Café Folk Series a rare evening indeed, with about 400 fans absorbing Earle’s tales and musical travails in the historic Royce Auditorium, accompanied only by guitarist and pedal-steel whiz Paul Niehaus.
Earle swung through the gamut of his career from the yet-to-be-released (“When the One You Love Loses Faith” from the upcoming “Absent Fathers” coming out in January), to the new (“White Gardenias” from 2014’s “Single Mothers”) to several tunes from 2012’s “Nothing’s Gonna Change the Way You Feel About Me Now,” 2010’s “Harlem River Blues,” and 2009’s “Midnight at the Movies.”
FULLY EMBRACING THROWBACK, OLD-TIMEY TEXTURED MUSIC
He even performed what might seem like an unlikely cover – Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” – but played it with such languorous beauty that the words took on new power, enhanced by the mournful wail of Niehaus’ pedal-steel guitar.
Introduced to the audience by Rob Reinhart, who interviewed Earle prior to the concert for a future Acoustic Café broadcast, Earle fully embraced the throwback, old-timey nature of his Americana-hued music, even looking like a country singer from the early ‘50s with his close-cropped hair, clad in a light blue shirt, jeans rolled up at the cuffs and a bandana hanging from his back pocket.
His laid-back and lovably quirky demeanor charmed the audience and seemed to play particularly well for thosewho’ve followed the career of the singer-songwriter and son of country rebel Steve Earle, though to be sure, the vocals sounded more crisp and clear in the center section of the auditorium than along the side rows.
Still, Earle’s earthy, sad songs and genuinely twangy music cut through regardless during this second installation of the Acoustic Café Folk Series (and the first headlined by a national touring act) and perhaps never more convincingly than on the two-part harmonies of the night’s final song, “Harlem River Blues,” with the haunting refrain: “Lord, I’m going uptown to the Harlem River to drown, dirty water gonna cover me over and I’m not gonna make a sound.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: The next concert in the Acoustic Café Folk Series will be announced in February and take place at St. Cecilia in spring 2015. Thursday night also was a study in musical contrasts in downtown Grand Rapids, with the retro-garage rock of Detroit’s The Mystery Lights and Grand Rapids’ Heaters blasting away in The Pyramid Scheme and 1,100-plus EDM fans cheering Canadian electronic music outfit Keys ‘N Krates at The Intersection. Check out the full photo gallery Sunday in the Local Spins Weekend Photo Gallery.
JUSTIN TOWNES EARLE: THE LOCAL SPINS PHOTO GALLERY
Photos by Anna Sink
Copyright 2014, Spins on Music LLC