Thoughts from last night:
- Townhouse: bass, mandolin and percussion is a great sonic ‘space’ for a voice. Having mandolin strumming rather than acoustic guitar makes space in the middle frequencies so the voice can come through; noticeable when they changed to guitar as rhythm instrument. Good band.
– Jill Hepburn: looking forward to listening to the CD, but pondering her performance. Voice small and fragile to the point of disappearing, guitar barely stroked – how is it that she comes across so powerfully? At first I thought it was just the excellent lyrics, but no, she makes you listen to the lyrics. For all the fragility, there’s a steely kind of honesty there. A kind of ‘this is me, I’m not playing games, posing or trying to be anyone else’. Combine this with a sense of humour and warmth between the songs, and you’ve got a compelling communicator.
– my fumbling answers to the question from friends ‘So what are you doing musically?’. One piece of advice popped into my mind from the ether ‘Get over thyself!’. Hmmm.
I’m wondering if by implication, “noticeable when they changed to guitar as rhythm instrument” meant that the vocals were slightly obscured once this switch to guitar had had occurred?
And Jill Hepburn, I’ve always loved her stuff. On paper, it sounds like it should be awful: not a great guitar player, very quiet voice, not especially confident. And I think for the reasons you’ve described, and probably some other indefinable qualites, it’s absolutely mesmerising.