“Dark, puckered hole: a purple carnation that trembles, nestled among the moss ... threads resembling milky tears there are spun.”
One Thursday in July, in a breezy week when smoke plumes from Canadian wildfires swept through the Great Lakes on the heels of a cool front, rendering greater Chicago's air quality to be declared "unhealthy for all" and causing our city to briefly top WHO's list of the most polluted cities on Earth, your intrepid HPPR correspondent dipped into his stash of N95 particulate respirator masks and made the 75-minute trek to the suburb of Evanston to witness two charming performances by these (L.A.-based, Michigan-bred) songsmiths, on tour together for a week or so.
Chicagoland is still getting used to the new unpredictable realities of wildfire smoke, and in an area with only three or four months of temperate weather, many indoor/outdoor spots remain so giddy at the ability to welcome the outdoors to their indoor that they're slow to adjust when an air quality alert strikes our city. Evanston's SPACE, it seems, is such a venue. The outer area, which boasts a spacious restaurant/bar area partially exposed to the elements, was not particularly crowded. Most of the supper crowd seemed to be staying home, as one might expect on a day when to breathe unfiltered air is to court illness.
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Present tense now: moving past security, entering the venue's inner chamber, and examining the billowing ceiling decor while masked and unmasked patrons trickle in, it's impossible not to think of Rimbaud and Verlaine's ribald 1871 sonnet. Thankfully, these thoughts don't have much time to, er, spiral, as Malena Cadiz quickly appears and begins to gently waft irregular musical notions about the sterile rectangular room.
Clad in a pale blue prairie gown and cradling a vintage Silvertone electric, she coaxes from it a filigree of idiosyncratically syncopated riffs which serve as an uneasy bed beneath her alternately crackling and cooing soprano. These stories cover love, yes—lost, longed-for, theorized, as well as the small moments between longing and pain which oft go unmentioned in song.
The room continues to fill with bodies. The guitar is a steady yet ghostlike presence. Eyes closed, it's not hard to imagine oneself in an old farmhouse, examining various weathered quilts and hand-tatted bedspreads an old widow'd laid out for us. To buy? To touch? To be seduced, perhaps abandoned? Yes to all, in that moment.
"Let's get our wires crossed," from the refrain of "Easy," reinforces this seduction, of performer over audience, of music over environment. The fifty or sixty ears in the room instantly prick, realizing they've been opened to a fresh feeling they'll soon recall, replay, and return to. "Let's get all high, lazy, and lost," she continues, and the crowd's tension releases; here is a feeling they can lean into, a trope of "Americana" as familiar as Outlaw country, as old as Storyville jazz, energized in Malena's telling by her mischievous diction, her sturdy phrasing, and the logic of each line's unfolding into the next. We all want, even need, to be some people other than ourselves, and these words, this inclusion of "us" as conspirators, draws us into the desire for easy chemistry with another other—what our mothers knew as "zipless" relationships, a thick nostalgia for something we/they might not have ever actually known. Clearly, this is the single.
The show continues, the guitar now a glowing set of coals around a camp where interesting stories are being swapped, the kind you know are life-changing even if you suspect you won't remember them the next morning. Fellow Michigander Elizabeth Pixley Fink is name-checked, and so is L. Cohen (more or less). Headliner Anna Ash joins on a couple, providing acoustic guitar and harmony vocal support, a pleasant taste of the voice to come. And now the lights come up, and the spell is broken.
But something is different: we all know each other now. We've all had our ears bent and surrendered to the same sounds; we now talk easy to one another. Strangers in adjacent rows amicably trade tales of their faiths and conversions, their workdays, their tenuous connections to the musicians on stage. We are now a community, and there's one more set of music to come.
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Anna Ash, dressed more informally in cutoffs and slinging the same Silvertone (they share guitars!), has a casual comfort about her, and announces that she's recovering from a cold. Her remarkable voice is renowned for its higher registers, and her songs often feature wordless passages of oohed and aahed melodies which, like a well-played pedal steel or theremin, can so effectively communicate blinding, ineffable ache. Tonight, the announcement seems intended to caution, will be a lower-register affair.
None of us assembled need worry, as Ash's "huskier" range proves more than adequate to the task. Her versatile voice, even thus compromised, suggests the raw power of effortless Appalachian belters like Loretta and Patsy, while also keening occasionally toward the pained twang of a Tammy or the dark poise of a Neko. Anna, not only an author but an authoritative interpreter of songs, slips in a Lucinda number that's served her well, and the crowd behaves as it's expected to.
If it seems perverse to declare the spaces between songs to be highlights of an ostensibly musical performance, it shouldn't. Anna's casual comfort extends to those moments as well. Aware of her particular charisma, she holds the audience gently in her palm while doing such mundane tasks as tuning up, adjusting the guitar strap, or clearing her throat; only after a rich, pregnant silence does she choose to drop a dryly comic one-liner or bon mot, and it's a joy to see her mind at work in these moments. Often self-deprecating ("I've really committed to these shorts") or poking fun at the desperate hellscape of contemporary tour "merch" culture (she has a nice bit explaining the scented candles and essential oils she's hawking), these asides display not only a deadpan, abstract wit but excellent comic timing. Should Ms. Ash ever tire of performing songs in front of people, she could certainly hold her own as a spoken-word performer. As if to prove this point, she handily neutralizes an overserved patron (heckler?) in the front row who's interpreted one of these silences as an invitation to overshare.
Returning Anna's earlier favor, Malena steps back up to augment her on stage for a number or two, and more of the touring twosome's stories are shared. Another extramusical feeling: we're being let into their world, their sisterhood, their road-dog late-night drivetales of old breakups and dead-end jobs, the anguished compromises of L.A. music-biz hustle and the threatened cocoons of Left Coast plant-mom dharma. These are women you'd want to have a shot of tequila with, sure—but more importantly, they're the ones you'd call to cry to after your boyfriend drank a whole bottle and smashed your laptop. The ones you'd take to the DMV with you, the ones you'd want to come feed you tea and chicken soup when you're home with the flu.
This will all be over soon. When the lights come on, pint glasses will be clonked and drained, chairs will slide and shoes will squeak on polished concrete, shirt sizes will be discussed and Square readers produced, but in the meantime, what a pleasant feeling! The sublime promise of better humanity still pokes through, even amid the New Clinical boutiques of "Live Music."
