Concert Review: Amy Allison at Banjo Jim’s, NYC 10/13/07

Allison defiantly seems to enjoy playing without a net. New York is dotted with good musicians who’ve played with her over the last few years, and lately she’s been pulling them out of the woodwork one by one. Because her schedule is so hectic, there’s never much time to rehearse, so she usually shows up without a set list. A cult artist with a devoted following who seem to know every song she’s ever touched, outtakes and obscurities included, she’s constantly bombarded with requests. And the love goes both ways: she does her best to indulge them, even if this means tackling songs she hasn’t performed in long time. Not an easy task, and even more difficult for her backing musicians. To further complicate matters tonight, Allison eventually divulged that she was on her way back from a memorial service for a friend, and just getting over a cold. Somehow she reached back and found something extra, in fact more than enough to compensate for however miserable she might have been feeling. Her voice might not have felt completely there, but it was impossible to tell: she nailed every note she sang. Tonight’s show was a telling reminder of what a great song stylist she is, improvising a lot of harmonies against the melody with a tone that varied from hushed and troubled to soaring and sweet.

 

Which is no surprise, because Allison is a great performer, a very charismatic one at that, somebody who’s earned a place in the pantheon alongside Iggy and James Brown and Tammy Faye Starlite. But her charisma is completely different from theirs. It’s a lot quieter, and very endearing. Allison is the kind of performer you root for: you want her to remember what key that 15-year-old song is in and you hope she had enough coffee before the show so she doesn’t get a migraine. A lot of her songs deal with being alone, although Allison seems to be pretty adept at it. She laughs at herself a lot, when she’s not cracking jokes at the audience – when she’s at the top of her game, she’s one of the most hilarious performers you will ever see. On one song, she forgot the words and vocalised along with the melody until they came back to her. “I need to make room in my brain for new lyrics,” she explained.

 

Allison and her longtime pedal steel player Bob Hoffnar – who dazzled all night with his tasteful, understated playing – opened with the wry Garden State Mall, followed by Troubled Boy, from her most recent album Everything and Nothing Too. The set list, such that it was (mostly audience requests) mixed upbeat, sometimes drolly entertaining songs from her first two country albums, including the jazz-inflected Don’t Go to Sleep, the big audience hit Sad Girl (which is something of a signature song for her), This Misery and All the Pretty Things to Buy with a lot of more recent material, including several spectacularly good unreleased numbers. If Allison’s lyrics are to be taken on face value (a dangerous assumption, but what the hell), the last couple of years have been something of a dark night of the soul for her. “Should I play another I-just-want-to-sleep-or-kill-myself songs?” she mused aloud. To her credit, the recent past may have been a rough ride, but she’s mined the depths for the best songs she’s ever written, including a bunch she played tonight. The slowly lilting girl-power anthem Have You No Pride packed a punch, a vivid reminder that a woman doesn’t need to look to a boyfriend for validation. No Frills Friend, an ironically upbeat, catchy account of a woman so desperate for companionship that she’s willing to hang out with someone who won’t even say a word to her was nothing short of scary. The best of the new songs tonight was Dreamland, a perfect capsulization of where Allison’s writing is right now: she can’t resist the urge to tell a clever joke, even while darkness descends to completely engulf her. But not all is completely gloom in the new Amy Allison catalog, as she proved with a touching, wistful reflection on hope and renewal called Calla Lily.

 

Another new one, The Last Mardi Gras, with its amusing “doot doot doot” bridge and lyrics (“I hear the distant music of the band/I’m losing all the feeling in my hands”) worked both as evocative elegy for a lost city and smashing countrypolitan hit. She finally closed the long, 90-minute show with Turn Out the Lights, her best song, a suicide anthem that ranks with anything Joy Division or Phil Ochs did for its starkness and bravery, humming calmly while staring into the abyss. I’ll take Amy Allison at eighty percent over anyone else at a hundred. “I’ve had my fill of restless nights/I’d just as soon turn out the lights.” But leave the night light on, Amy, we need you more than ever in times like these.