Home > Austin Music Source > Archives > 2010 > March > 19 > Entry
SXSW review: Americana showcase
“Americana” can be a slippery genre term, encompassing everyone from Taj Mahal to Bob Wills. But Austin singer-songwriter Hayes Carll may have managed to put a pin in it during the Americana Music Association showcase at Antone’s Thursday night. “Ah,” he said, upon receiving a frosty fermented beverage onstage during his set. “That’s how you know you’re at an Americana show — they bring you a beer up before the fifth song. I was at (another showcase) yesterday, and they didn’t bring us nothin’. As my friend Jim Lauderdale would say: ‘That’s…Americana!’”
Lauderdale, the rare Nashville songwriter who straddles the line between hit-making commercial success (he’s penned hits for George Strait) and soulful roots-music cred (Buddy Miller and Patty Griffin both sat in on his set), was in attendance, as were a host of fans, friends and fellow travelers, all united in celebration of the plain-spoken songwriting and genre-scrambling fusion of country, blues, rock and bluegrass that mark the perennial undercurrent of music that flows from Nashville to Austin to L.A.
Lauderdale started his set at a smoking pace with the blistering “Life By Numbers,” before moderating the tempo with a couple of new songs, “The Louisville Road” and “Between Your Heart and Mine,” both featuring guest vocals from Griffin, and winding up with a honky-tonk one-two punch of “King of Broken Hearts” (a hit for Strait) and “Halfway Down.”
Also on the bill was Elizabeth Cook, a sassy performer in a barely-there black miniskirt who sang “Sometime it takes balls to be a woman” and told rueful tales about greasy ex-boyfriends in chopped and channeled cars, but then she hushed the room with a raw, confessional tale whose title says it all — “Heroin Addict Sister.”
Cook is from the Sassy Broad School whose alumni include Miranda Lambert and Gretchen Wilson, but she isn’t above poking fun at herself. While her guitarist took the lead, she kicked off her cowboy boots and cut a rug onstage. After catching her breath, she made a confession: “One, Antone’s has a great stage for clogging. And, two, there’s a reason cloggers don’t wear strapless dresses.”
Cook dressed up for her showcase appearance; Hayes Carll, well, dressed. Carll, an uncannily canny songwriter, likes to portray himself as a walking hard luck case, first cousin to Pigpen in the “Peanuts” cartoons. Like kindred spirits Ray Wylie Hubbard, James McMurtry and Todd Snider, he works in what might be called the High Sardonic mode.
Recalling one unfortunate gig, he harkened back to “the Midnight Rodeo in Lampasas on a Tuesday night…the kind of place where they have a mechanical sheep.” One of his song’s characters, addressing the author, sneers, “Boy, you ain’t a poet/You’re just a drunk with a pen.”
All of which might be cause for concern if Carll wasn’t so insightful and self-aware and happy to be among God’s Chosen to stand onstage and sing every night. Songs like “It’s Hard Out Here,” “Drunken Poet’s Dream” and “Bad Liver and A Broken Heart” may sound dire, but Carll still gives you the feeling he’s the kid who’s broken into the candy store.
(The night’s bill also included the Court Yard Hounds — see the review in a separate entry — and Grace Potter and the Nocturnals.)
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | | Categories: SXSW 2010
