For reasons not clearly understood, folk songs have earned a reputation as little more than boring campfire ditties.
Granted, some folk music is downright boring. But boring is hardly an adjective a person of even average intelligence would use to describe Patty Larkin. As anyone at Friday night's sold-out Museum of Fine Arts performance will attest, this folk singer is anything but boring. Eccentric, maybe, but certainly not boring.Whether she is creating mental images of the unforgettably absurd (for example, how about Ethel Merman "channeling" during a shopping trip to the mall?) or plucking at the heart-strings with introspective vignettes, Larkin proved herself again an American songwriting treasure with a heart as big as Iowa and a soul that cries for the simpler side of life.
As she quipped to her Salt Lake devotees, "I'm an analog girl in a digital world."
The simplicity of that ideal remains the dominant undercurrent to Larkin's songwriting, despite her detailed lyrical tapestry that projects vivid images of poignancy, dark humor and unsettling social ills. For the most part, they are story songs, and Larkin's casual delivery and loose songwriting style creates that comfortable feeling of friends lounging around the living room reminiscing about people and places that have come and gone.
Nowhere is this more evident than on Larkin's just-released "Angels Running," her fifth and best solo album, and the focus of Friday's night's performance. Larkin started her set with "Who Holds Your Hand," a tale of loneliness, followed by the long-time crowd favorite "Dave's Holiday" (complete with customized lyrics for her Salt Lake audience).
Then it was quickly back to new tunes from "Angels Running," songs like the superbly poignant "Do Not Disturb," the equally haunting "Helen," and the wondering-where-old-love-goes melancholy of "I told Him My Dog Wouldn't Run." One of the evening's best had to be "Booth of Glass," a song that screams of isolation and loneliness.
She followed that up with the wickedly humorous "Video," a not-so-subtle slap at pop music commercialism that rivals Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing" and Neil Young's "This Note's For You." The irony? Larkin will soon be filming her first video at the insistence of her record company, High Street Records. Her choice for a "hit" video? You guessed it.
Whether it be the tongue-in-cheek silliness of "At the Mall" or the harsh social realism of "Metal Drums," Larkin possesses that rare passion that allows her to wrap poetry with the power of music.
Hers are rarely words that simply sound good or rhyme neatly on a lyric sheet. Instead, they are ideas that sometimes whisper, sometimes scream, their way into the consciousness of the listener.
The emotional power and variety of Larkin's music was evident in her final three songs of the evening (all from "Angels Running"): "Good Thing," a song she subtitled "Looking at the face of forever;" "Might as Well Dance," an upbeat, bluegrassy song to which she added a sensational slide guitar; and "Winter Wind," a song of pure artistry.
Opening for Larkin was Michael McNiven, an "up and coming" singer songwriter with a penchant for bittersweet humor. Among the best of his short set were "Jersey Jail," about the absurdity of spending the night in jail for skipping out on an 80-cent transit toll, and "Busy Life," an upbeat tune that stands in decided contrast to a more serious message about life's priorities.
McNiven is at his best when humor becomes the vehicle for his messages, like on the tune about Little League baseball or his send-up of Paul Simon's "The Boxer," which pokes deserved fun at the Internal Revenue Service and his rather cavalier attitude toward paying taxes.