Betty Soo, from Austin, Texas, on her first visit to Northern Ireland, opened quietly and confidently with a short set. After One Thing (from 2022’s INSOMNIA WAKING DREAM), she explained that she has been battling depression and ADHD for many years, and followed with 100 Different Ways Of Being Alone. Soo has been touring the US with fellow Texan, James McMurtry, and he did her the honour of singing his Gulf Road as a duet with her on her new release, IF YOU NEVER GO AWAY. She closed out with a chilling version of Woodie Guthrie’s Deportee, which, as she pointed out, was written over 75 years ago but could have been written today.
On paper, US singer-songwriter Chris Smither is approaching 81 years old. However, his demeanour, physical appearance and performance tonight could lead one to believe that he was at least ten years younger! Touring his 2024 album (his 19th studio recording) ALL ABOUT THE BONES, the packed house in the intimate theatre in the North Coast seaside town experienced a now rare concert from the master of folk/blues songwriting and guitar playing.
Chris was clearly pleased to be back and was more relaxed than ever, serving up a generous 90 minute set, to what was clearly an audience of longtime fans. Launching into the slightly risqué, innuendo laden, I’m Your Cure, he accompanied himself all night with his usual meticulously accurate percussion in the form of both feet tapping. He followed this with the title track from the same 2009 album, the love song Time Stands Still.
Then it was time for some newish songs, which he quipped he ‘knows how to play by now’. In a chatty mood all night, he relayed, with some amusement, a recent quote about him in the NYT. All About The Bones is a good example of the black humour that infuses both his music and his stage patter - ‘Used to be somebody/Now it’s nothin’ but the bones’. There were lots of anecdotes about his upbringing by his academic parents in New Orleans, where one of his Cajun neighbours, Boudraux, was the subject of another new song, Down In Thibodaux.
He then went back almost three decades to the devotion of Small Revelations, after which he fast-forwarded to the hilarious Diggin’ The Hole. Train Home also deals with mortality, though written over twenty years ago. Chris opened up about his occasional struggle for inspiration in his songwriting and he admitted that he often doesn’t know what his songs are about until he is half way through them, they seem to come from some deep subliminal place. Another new song, In The Bardo, concerns that ill defined liminal space between death and rebirth (a common concept in voodoo in his native NOLA), and it was quite unsettling. Thankfully it was on next to a slightly lighter topic, in the form of 2014’s Hundred Dollar Valentine, a litany of the effects of heartbreak including ‘My wheels are spinning but they just don’t roll/I’m standing dead on my feet’.
The most chilling offering on the night, prefaced by describing himself as a refugee from the US, was the new song Close The Deal, an apocalyptic take on the current state of the US. No further explanation was necessary.
The familiar Link of Chain, with its refrain ‘we go to the end/we play it right down to the wire’ lifted the mood somewhat, and he followed it with If Not For the Devil. More anecdotes flowed, including how he was struggling again recently with writer’s block (he never has a problem with melodies) and the arrival of his producer Goody Goodrich to Smither’s Boston home made all the difference and the songs came fast, including the new love song, Still Believe In You. Closing his set with the folk song No More Cane On The Brazos and the much loved and most appropriate oldie, Leave the Light On. For the inevitable encore he treated us to the bittersweet Sittin’ On Top Of The World. Chris Smither is playing and singing as well now as he ever has. Long may he run.
Review and photos by Eilís Boland