NICK SHOULDERS, MARGO CILKER AND CAITLIN HARNETT
Factory Theatre, Marrickville, October 9
GOSH DARNIT, THAT WAS a good night. Started well, found new ways to please and finished on a collective, communal high that was part revival meeting, part political rally, and part – big part – late night family party that’s your favourite cousin loved up pass the bottle tell me another one clear the floor you know what he’s right how good is that whistling let’s grow a beard hoedown-in-our-seats.
Yeah, I liked it.
But let’s go back to the beginning, when the two Americans were preceded by an Australian who doesn’t just lean American musically with her roots/’70s West Coast mix, but has been taken in (including being covered by an all-male American band who happily sing her song about thinking you might be pregnant) as one of their own.
Caitlin Harnett, a quality Sydney songwriter usually found with her oft-raucous band, is a one-woman party when she wants to be but here, playing solo, she was mostly in slowly crushing sadness and quiet hurts mode. And it worked a treat – not least in the aforementioned ghost pregnancy song, 5 AM – emphasising the bruise in her voice that elevated lyrics from personal to insightful, and showing how her humour can be leavening rather than dominating.
The Pacific Northwest’s Margo Cilker, who was off to the side of the room watching, approved. You could see why when Cilker, also solo on acoustic, came on. Nervous and chatty and oversharing and charming, she plays country music that isn’t going to tell you it is a country song – it just is – and story songs that feel rooted in something old and complicated but touched by post-‘60s experience.
Lowland Trail and Barbed Wire were two that came from the most ordinary aspects of a regular life, sung with a voice that shifted them from the quotidian without being anything more than solid and warm and unfussed, more Texas than Tennessee. Elsewhere there was the detail and warmth in a song she learnt from John Hiatt, Road To Las Cruces, and a chilled wind through That River.
She offered a song Emmylou Harris would have loved to cover in the 1980s, Rose Of Nowhere, and another that seemed built to be sung in the wide back seat of a clapped out car with your friends, Keep It On A Burner. And there was the already-defining Tehachapi, which remains jaunty even as the jokes darken the horizon.
There are certainly darkened horizons and grim realities – principally natural, amidst a climate crisis, but also cultural, amidst an anti-worker/racist/so bloody stupid national crisis – in the work of Arkansas’ Nick Shoulders. But none of that important stuff interferes with the equally important emphasis on joy. I mean, there’s a whistling solo in Lonely Like Me and somehow it doesn’t feel in any way ridiculous. Come on, that’s not possible surely.
Paired with the double bass and harmonies of Grant D’Aubin (who played as a one-man groove machine in All Bad and a poker-faced straight man to the bubbling brook of chat from centre-stage), Shoulders wasn’t just happy to be here – as he couldn’t stop himself from saying through the whole set – he was on a mission. As much was reflected in a singing style that hiccups and yodels even when he isn’t yodelling and that dances even if the song is not prancing.
Along with the honky tonk hijinks of Rather Low and the holy roller song of resistance, G For Jesus, Blue Endless Highway was a joyous number about keeping an eye out for the patrol cars, that took control of our feet and made them tap furiously. Then came Miss’ppi, blending crooning, a swig of sarsaparilla and a light dance across the parlour to the Victrola, that was such a flashback to 1930s radio (if they were aware of climate change) that it should have been preceded by a soap or pomade ad.
The duo offered Black Star, which mixed Elvis’ Flaming Star and Webb Pierce in a way even the Colonel would have approved, and almost casually tossed us Bound And Determined, another original that saves us the trouble of imagining what it would be like to have an instantly-hooky children’s song with lyrics written by James Baldwin and Bernie Sanders. And they closed with a testifying song that you could march to, hug to, stand in the picket line to, or offer to Billy Bragg on his next tour.
The many people who knew the words and the tunes and were happy to show it, explained why this gig moved from the small room downstairs to the main room. The huge contented smiles everywhere explained why it should be an even bigger room (maybe with space to dance) next time. Mission completed. As Shoulders sang in that last song … appreciate ya.
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Nick Shoulders and Margo Cilker play
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