Sunday, September 10, 2006

shawn Colvin

Music Review
Singing of Midlife Messiness

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By BEN RATLIFF
Published: September 9, 2006

Shawn Colvin looks and sounds well put-together, a confident performer getting things done. Fifty now and athletically built, she articulates every little note of a vocal run through a tight mouth and draws precise details of rhythm and sound out of her acoustic guitar, chopping and bumping the strings with her fingers or the heel of her hand.
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But in almost every song she sang at Joe’s Pub on Thursday night, there lived a vexed character who was coming off track and about to get stuck in a grim psychological loop.

They were mostly songs from her new record, “These Four Walls,” to be released Tuesday by Nonesuch. Their protagonists weren’t necessarily time bombs, like the character in “Sunny Came Home,” her 1997 hit about a woman who burns her own house down because she can’t think of a reason not to.

These are more privately enacted messes: the passive-aggressive voice at the center of “Fill Me Up,” who needs attention and inviolate space in equal measures and talks to a new friend with a mixture of threat and desire (“I know where you live/ And I know who you are/ Don’t get too close and don’t go too far”).

In “Summer Dress” a woman puts on something gauzy and liberating before going outside, but she might as well be wearing a flak jacket. (“I went out to face the wilderness,” she sang. “The men in hats, the boys on bikes, the perfect girls, the baby dykes/The superstars, the blighted ones/I went out to face them one by one.”)

These songs, of course, are in one way or another about coming to terms with middle age, and this is a subject Ms. Colvin’s grown-up audience very much wants to hear. But for the most part the songs acidly refuse to dignify the subject by naming it.

Written with John Leventhal, the guitarist and producer with whom she has worked off and on for 25 years, the new songs put their tightly wound lyrics in fairly mundane settings. The problem with “These Four Walls,” which is a pretty good Shawn Colvin record, is that it’s an ever-deepening comfort zone: a further refining of the Tom Petty-like roots-rock sound and the Texas folk-country style of the 1970’s.

Thursday’s show was a little overdefined by Ms. Colvin’s small backup band, including Mr. Leventhal on lead guitar, with his cropped country lines. The band shrank her, and the show felt a little mechanical. But when she sang and played solo, things looked up. It happened toward the end, in a cover of “Words,” the Bee Gees hit from 1968 — a song about being powerless but desirous, like many of her own.