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On September 12th, 2019 I was pleasantly surprised to find myself at Ottawa’s CityFolk Festival, courtesy of a last-minute pair of tickets gifted to me by a friend as an early wedding present. Following a summer that saw me shun each and every music festival that came my way* I was happy for the opportunity to stand in a field with an overpriced beer in my hand and a creeping cloak of disinterest clouding my soul.
And that – after walking a mile from home-to-venue – is exactly what I did.
And I wasn’t alone either. Well, m’lady was with me, and upon arrival we found a gaggle of friends to stand with, but that’s not what I’m referring to. No, when I say I wasn’t alone, what I mean is that the star of the show – the wonderfully talented Lucinda Williams – seemed every bit as ennui-d as I.
Now I’ve seen Lucinda several times and I respect her greatly, and while I’ll admit that I’ve never had her completely knock me out live I will simultaneously concede that I am always happy to hear her sing anything from her Car Wheels on a Gravel Road album; the material is so strong and every track shows off her incredible voice so well. But I tell you, on this pleasant evening Lucinda was hitting nothing but foul balls.
She was boring and unenergetic and – gasp! – she was reading the lyrics for every song out of a binder set on a music stand next to her microphone. I couldn’t believe it…she was even reading the lyrics to her own big hits! How is that possible?
(After a lifetime of campfire and kitchen party jams I’ll admit I have a huge, longstanding beef with musicians playing songs that they are reading out of binders. It boils down to this: if you gotta follow along with a piece of paper it means you’re playing a song that you don’t know how to play, and why would you do that?!?! Geez.**)
The utter lack of oomph coming from the stage was loud and clear, and as Lucinda’s set started to wind down the already-thin crowd got even thinner as mildly-interested festival pass holders made their way indoors to the secondary stage where the stellar acoustic duo Larkin Poe was playing to a crowd so big that when I walked over after Lucinda’s last song I couldn’t get my nose in the door.
But I huddled outside well within earshot for several numbers and it sounded like they were killing it in there.
A week later I heard that Lucinda’s bus had broken down in Philly the night before and the band had to scramble their way to Ottawa, only arriving a couple of hours before the start of their set, a scramble that clearly knocked the band off kilter. Which just goes to show just how many factors there are that can influence a performance.
That still doesn’t explain why Lucinda needed a lyric sheet to sing Drunken Angel or Changed the Locks. You’d think by now she could sing those in her sleep.
*This was my last summer living in Ottawa and through a combination of frugality, general disinterest, and festival fatigue I had skipped both the jazz fest and the blues fest in their entireties – a first for me – and was ready to skip CityFolk too, with the exception of buying a ticket for the final day, which featured Robert Plant. Ennui is one thing, but Led Zeppelin is quite another.
**Jazz and classical pieces are a bit of a different thing – being more visual mediums than audio – but even then you’ll find that most players do know the music they are playing. The music in front of most jazz and classical players is more talisman than script.
Todd Man Out 