The Musical Box

mark olson and gary louris

A curious dichotomy was at work at last night’s taping of the WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour.

On one hand, we had Mark Olson and Gary Louris, former chieftains of the Jayhawks, deconstructing their roles as Americana bandleaders. Instead, they worked as unaccompanied sketch artists designing generous but unglamorous folk-pop portraits.

Then there was California-born, Swiss-raised songwriter Lori Lieberman. Her newer coffeehouse-friendly songs seemed to have been designed for sparse, intimate accompaniment but were augmented last night by a full pick up band of local musicians.

The four tunes Olson and Louris presented from their fine new Ready for the Flood album certainly recalled the harmony rich music they fashioned together in the Jayhawks during the ‘90s. But harmony is a largely misleading tag for their new music. The two delivered nearly every verse of every song together with Olson’s deeper, more sobering singing balancing Louris’ higher, more plaintively pop-inclined vocals.

At times, the results were quietly stunning, as on Saturday Morning on Sunday Street. To say the song brought to mind the more hollowed pop-folk of early Simon and Garfunkel is not an exaggeration. It wasn’t until the end of the beautifully bittersweet Turn Your Pretty Name Around that the two voices, briefly, split apart. Louris then took the lead on a scrappy but soulful encore of Two Hearts, the evening’s only Jayhawks entry.

Lieberman has been making records for over 35 years, although raising a family put her career largely on hold during the ‘80s and early ‘90s. Her four songs from the just released (as in last week) Gun Metal Sky album summoned a very different set of references, specifically the Joni Mitchell-style intonation that highlighted Every Wednesday Morning.

While it was very cool to have local players at Lieberman’s side, their talents weren’t terribly well utilized. Sentimental narratives like He Needs You didn’t really require much by way of window dressing. Neither did her other songs, for that matter. That might explain why a cellist and percussionist seemed to sit out a sizable chunk of the show.

Guitarist Phillip High added a modest and efficient Spanish flair to solos during Killing Me Softly (the Roberta Flack hit inspired by a Lieberman poem) and The Opposite of Love. But the band arrangement derailed during an encore of Emmylou Harris’ My Baby Needs a Shepherd. Were the amped up guitar colors supposed to sound like an ambient seascape or a cloudburst of distortion? Both impressions were conveyed. Both were distractions.

Whether scaling down or dressing up, simpler is always better for a show like WoodSongs. On that score, we’ll call Olson and Louris, along with their low-fi folk sketches, the evening’s clear winners.