Image by Liz Schroeter
Laura Veirs showers New York with down-to-earth charm
May 22, 2008, at Bowery Ballroom
By Liz Schroeter
Published: May 25th, 2008 | 10:15am
"I feel too shy to look at you when I'm singing," the bespectacled Laura Veirs admitted to the front row at the crowded Bowery Ballroom.
A room that can hold more than 500 people would make any solo artist a little sheepish. Despite saying she felt shy, however, Veirs didn't act it one bit. Not one to run around the stage, perform dance moves, or wear some kind of rock star getup, she commands the audience's attention with her down-to-earth attitude and confident musical abilities. Of the former, Veirs will talk to a room, whether it's 16 people or 600, as if they are good friends. On this particular night, she candidly told the audience how it's not bad being on the road just her and her friend Megan. She misses the bearded guys that usually back her up, but she added, "It's easier to pee and eat."
Sure, Laura Veirs’ sweet-yet-conversational singing voice and her fingerpicking guitar work are strong enough to carry songs like the show opener “Pink Light,” but when she started layering with the delay pedal, the songs took on a bigger sound than seemed possible for this one small woman alone on a stage with an acoustic guitar. The palm of her hand tapping the guitar became a backbeat to a guitar line placed on top of that. Then she pressed the distortion pedal and solos over it all, and suddenly she was percussion, acoustic rhythm, and electric lead all in one. And that was before she even layered three vocal harmonies with just her own small voice. This kind of music doesn’t just take talent; it takes math.
As it happens, math and science are just as much Veirs’ area of expertise as is music. Geology was her first love before she picked up the guitar, and it’s not unusual to hear boulders and other natural wonders finding their way into her songs.
Partway through her set, Veirs traded her guitar for a banjo and showed off chops of the old-timey variety. She also played a couple of covers that can be found on a tour-only EP (the cutely named Two Beers Veirs) for which she recorded songs that inspired her to write music over the years. This included “Freight Train” by Elizabeth Cotton, whom Veirs admiringly described as playing “upside down and backwards.”
Diving even further into atypical material, what followed was a freestyle jam that Veirs insisted, with a sly grin, had a subtle message. She fired up a drum machine to her right and began a monotone chant, “O-BA-MA. O-BA-MA.” The audience cheered and smiled from ear to eat as she chanted over the beat, “Isn’t he handsome? Isn’t he smart?” Obama had never sounded so lyrical.
Throughout the set, Laura Veirs played numerous songs off her 2007 album Saltbreakers (Nonesuch) and 2005’s Year of Meteors (Nonesuch). It’s always a shame, though, when she doesn’t break out crowd favorite “Galaxies” on her solo tours, due to not having a band to fill in all the necessary drums and noise. Luckily for NYC, Veirs invited opener Liam Finn (son of Crowded House’s Neil Finn) and his partner Eliza-Jane Barnes to back her up on an encore performance of the track. “Gravity is dead, you see, no gravity,” they all sang together as the audience levitated just a little.
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