REVIEW: A double bill to warm a folk fan's soul

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Posted: November 2, 2008 - 4:28 pm

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By Dawnell Smith
Anchorage Daily News

Singer-songwriters Patty Larkin and Peter Mulvey put on a wicked and winsome show Saturday night in the Sydney Laurence Theatre, performing a double bill ranging from the funky and downtrodden to jazzy, earnest, eerie and ironic.

Concerts usually center on the headliner, but this one felt more collaborative than hierarchical, more a single thread woven in different ways than threads cut from a different cloth.

Mulvey took the stage first with the rousing guitar groove in "If Love is Not Enough," rebuffed with a riff from KC & The Sunshine Band's "That's the Way I Like It" for good measure.

Like all good writers and travelers, he has a keen eye for details and knows how to make small observations go a long way in a story. He also knows how to pace conversation and song, tossing in a personal story about his first time onstage as a 7-year-old boy in a production of "Oklahoma" on skates before rolling into a song about the dreams smoldering in the flesh and bones of folks on a train.

Mulvey's songs speak easily of broken things and loved things, as does his guitar. The crowd glowed after the elegant instrumental "Black Rabbit." He opened the song by remarking on how he wrote the song early in his career and now views it as derivative of some Irish melody passed to him genetically.

My favorite of his tunes, "Windshield," reflects on the gritty, poignant malaise of everyday life. He wrote the song from his experiences in Alaska, particularly Fairbanks, where every windshield "has seen better days." The tune felt right after a cold, dark night driving yet another old car with a jagged line etched into the glass.

Songs like "Shirt" and "Mailman" took a much sweeter perspective, but not without a sense of yearning and melancholy. The Wisconsin native played for over an hour and got a standing ovation from many in the audience.

The crowd certainly looked content at intermission—almost eager to hear him play again—only to sit back down for Larkin's acoustic and electric set with sonic odes layered with looped guitar work. Catchy lyrics and finger work made "The Book I'm Not Reading" a crowd pleaser while songs like "Dear Heart" verged on dirges.

A Wisconsin native living in New York, Larkin played multiple instruments in her 2008 release, "Watch the Sky," and said that having two young adopted children made her write, perform and produced the CD "during naptime."

The album certainly has a dreamy, ghostly quality, even songs performed with only a guitar. Larkin let her voice moan plaintively in the vaguely creepy "Walking in My Sleep" but sounded as pure and unadorned as a prayer in "Dear Heart," where she sings, "Dear heart, don't break for me/I'm gonna need you soon, you'll see/like it was before."

Two other songs from her new album, "Beautiful" and “Hallelujah,” really caught fire through her remarkable guitar work. Where "Hallelujah" came off as a complex pop-folk gem loaded with blustery hopefulness, "Beautiful" told the story of love and defiance with a driving riff every bit as blissful as its characters walking through Central Park.

Folk fans couldn't have asked for more, but Whistling Swan Productions promises yet another dynamic double bill next week when Ruthie Foster and Eric Bibb play at Vagabond Blues and the Sydney Laurence Theatre (www.whistlingswan.net) and then again in December with Dan Bern and Marshall Crenshaw.

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