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| Flynn, Swenson, Hunt (photo by Shelli Baldwin) |
On Kelly Hunt’s 2019 debut album, Even the Sparrow, she has this remarkable song (well, one of twelve, this one called “Men of Blue & Grey”) about a greenhouse patched with glass photographic plates from the Civil War. New life finds its way through the images of dying soldiers. There’s something core to Hunt’s songwriting in such an image.
During her opening set, she talked of writing songs, picking her banjo on the green caboose that sits at the end of Main Street in her hometown of Weston, Missouri. From this port on the Missouri River, where the Santa Fe Trail and the Oregon Trail both began, it’s not only easy to imagine this young woman feeling all the yearning and fear in that history, but also almost impossible not to hear her wrenching hope and loss out of each word she sings.
She lay a solid foundation for Swenson, who came onstage and met us right where we’ve all been living these last three years. Accompanied by understated, precise guitar (and a little mandolin) from John Flynn, Swenson joined us in the darkest part of the night with her song “Brother,” a celebration of what just might matter most, that we’re there for each other when dawn seems so far away. It’s a beautiful meditation on that need, one that brings out the full swing of Swenson’s vocals, from an alto drawl someplace close to Lucinda William’s gravel roads to someplace not only high and lonesome but delicate and bright, a light in the darkness.
After, she said, “That’s the song my daughter calls my imaginary brother song.” And the room laughed, as we did many times that night. Swenson told stories of her kids and her sister’s kids. Then there was her grandfather, celebrated on the song, “My Little Girl.” That’s a song about a time, after her grandmother died, that little Sara called up her grandfather and asked if she could spend the night with him. She reveled in his memory, explaining how he liked to share information he’d gathered from newspaper clippings, always pointing at the family with such a decisive move she swore they could hear his index finger pop.
Adding to the familial feel of the set, Hunt joined Swenson most of the time, standing to her left while Flynn played on the right. Like the “imaginary brother” her daughter calls her on, Swenson managed to weave a family not only out of characters fictional and real in her songs, but out of the circle of friends, family, and fans gathered in Carl Butler’s Gospel Lounge in the back of Knuckleheads, already the most intimate room in the venue.
She did this with a hard focused, yet playful progression of ideas. The imaginary brother gave way to the “Messy Love” where two partners never quite give the other what he or she wants but manage to have what they need. Then she defined the whole of it with “Welcome to the Family,” a song Swenson smiled and introduced as, “We’re all just doing the best we can.”
She sang of one of her first glimpses of parenthood, the rollicking “O, My Babies,” inspired by her sister’s children. She followed that with the lingering contentment of “Night Sounds,” a song she punctuated with the end comment, “Those were the kind of night sounds you heard lying out on your deck in Hyde Park, before kids,” then hilariously impersonated children finding every reason on earth not to settle down and go to sleep.
Though she had us all laughing, she wasn’t done with the quiet. Hunt and Flynn went and sat down. Swenson said, “I’m going to try something.” She then offered a solo, acoustic version of the title track of her 2010 album, “All Things Big and Small,” a simple lyric, part prayer and part lullaby. “Hold these seconds near your heart like a locket.” Though we could hear the bands over in the Knuckleheads garage and out on the roadhouse deck, we leaned in and did just that.
Hunt then joined Swenson for a still spare—their voices and Swenson’s guitar—version of “Big Pretty City” from her 2014 album Runway Lights. Before she began singing, she explained she wrote it as a celebration of London. Without knowing that, it’s all too evident that this mandala-like work is a rich portrait of the ephemeral’s movement through that which seems eternal. The turning lights of that song brilliantly set up perhaps her most famous song, “Time to Go” (featured on the television show The Practice) and the close of this warm, familial vision, “Vistas,” a song about the infinite possibilities of a single relationship.
Introducing, “Time to Go,” Swenson laughed and said, “But don’t go yet. We’re not done.” The set ended with a surprise, the greatest song by the greatest songwriter lost to COVID. All three were on stage together for a gorgeous rendition of John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery,” and joy and pain could not have been more perfectly wedded. Swenson, Hunt, and Flynn gave flight to that imaginary (but all too real) old woman in the song and gave everyone in the room a reminder of what community can be even in a portrait of its absence.
https://saraswenson.com/ https://www.kellyhuntmusic.com/
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Earlier blog about Swenson:
https://takeemastheycome.blogspot.com/2011/11/sara-swenson-pearl-snaps-and-soft-touch.html
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