The advertising for tonight made a big deal about how it was a recession beating $5 show, but in my mind that’s all it should have been. I hadn’t heard of Daniel Martin Moore, despite the fact that he’s a Sub Pop artist (which doesn’t mean what it used to). I was just wanted to see my friends Jentri and Robbie who were opening the show with a solo set from each.
Robbie gave up his weekly spot in Mickey’s Honky Tonk Tuesday line-up last summer and until tonight I didn’t realize exactly how much I’d missed him. His booming voice could sometimes be a little big for the corner bar’s cozy confines, but it was perfect for the High Noon’s spaciousness. The set was familiar as his “sad bastard” songs, tunes that made up the bulk of his solo outings but are seldom part of Blueheels’ sets. I do love those songs for being so different from the band material. He introduced a “song about a marriage,” where the husband walks out after learning they were going to have a baby, by adding, “hopefully not mine.” He ended the set with my favorite of what he calls his “epic waltzes” despite the fact that none of them were over three minutes. An eye blink of a song, “Feel So Stupid” chronicles the story of a man who falls asleep with the Christmas lights on only to wake up and find the house has burned down around him.
Tonight Robbie dressed up his usual self-proclaimed janitor outfit with a tie, which Jentri claimed during her set was part of a deal where she had to wear a dress. The former she claimed was not unusual, the latter was. While I have seen her in a dress before, she does favor a T-shirt and jeans for most of her shows. Tonight she looked absolutely radiant in a pink dress with a full skirt; the clunky winter boots that finished the outfit made it her own. It had been awhile since I had seen her without the band. While occasionally she play as a duo with Josh Harty, this may have been the first time I’d seen her completely solo since the long ago days at the Local. I’d gotten the feeling that she didn’t like to play solo, but she sounded terrific tonight. The draw has always been her hypnotic voice and her intensely personal songs, both of which were emphasized solo.
As the headliner Daniel Martin Moore had two tough acts to follow. His songs were lovely and the accompaniment of keyboards and mandolin were beautiful, but ultimately he wasn’t as interesting as the acts that preceded him. More memorable than his songs was his commitment to ending mountaintop removal mining, a big concern in his home state of Kentucky. My take home message from his show was that I should go to iLoveMountains.org, not necessarily that I should buy his CD.
Robbie Schiller
Jentri Colello
Daniel Martin Moore
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