“You don’t come to my show to have a good time,” Shawn Colvin said from the Capitol Theater stage — kidding, but not entirely. She was riffing on her penchant for writing breakup songs and exploring the darker side of romantic relationships. Let’s call her 80-minute solo show on Wednesday night a different kind of good time: cozy, introspective, thought-provoking, sad, sweet… and wryly funny.
Mixing songs and spoken anecdotes — some of them fairly long — she delivered a wholly engaging set that left the, um, mature audience charmed, relaxed and a little wistful. Armed with an acoustic guitar — and taking a short detour to a piano — Colvin proved herself a first-rate performer in a format the can be drearily dull in the hands of a lesser artist.
At 63, she still sings like an angel. Colvin may strain a bit for the highest notes, and occasionally shy away from them, but the crystalline richness of her voice and her prowess at delivering lyrics is, if anything, more potent than when she released her debut album, Steady On, nearly 30 years ago. “Sunny Came Home,” performed mid-set, was a case in point. It’s perhaps easy to forget — I had — that the tune won Grammys for Song of the Year and Record of the Year in 1998. While at the time I loved “Sunny” and the album it came from, A Few Small Repairs, my general feeling was that it hadn’t aged well.
Colvin beat that notion out of me with a powerful rendition that added new vitality, and more visceral anger, to a song about an alienated woman considering whether to burn down her house.
After robust applause, Colvin doled out a few stories about what it was like to have a hit record — “there’s nothing wrong with it” — and the year or so of real fame she enjoyed. She told of the time she played a Christian singer on The Simpsons, there to soothe the newly widowed Ned Flanders. Colvin then belted out, a cappella, a silly country song from the show — written for her, she pointed out — delighting the crowd.
She told her stories in a mellifluous speaking voice that’s its own seductive instrument. (If Terry Gross ever needs a new stand-in…)
Colvin is an expert guitarist, which tends to be undervalued in the singer-songwriter milieu. Rather than simply strum basic chords, she crafts six-string arrangements that support the song, and adds percussive low-note accents that provide rhythmic spice to what are essentially laid-back tunes. This requires a capo and considerable tuning between each number, but she managed it deftly, and with self-deprecation (“what the fuck am I doing?”)
Keeping audience in mind, Colvin does not reinvent her songs to amuse herself, but she does infuse them with an elasticity that renders them fresh. She played a few relatively obscure numbers, but mostly focused on the familiar — and vintage: “Polaroids,” “Shotgun Down the Avalanche,” “Steady On,” “Diamond in the Rough.” Colvin showed off her fondness for cover songs — she’s released two studio albums worth — with Bruce Springsteen’s “Tougher Than the Rest,” from 2015’s Uncovered. (I would’ve preferred The Band’s “Acadian Driftwood,” or Brenton Wood’s “Gimme Little Sign,” or Stevie Wonder’s “Heaven is Ten Zillion Light Years Away,” but it wasn’t my set list, and there was no tip jar.) For her first encore, she visited the piano for Tom Waits’ “Ol’ 55.”
Colvin remained at the keyboard for “If I Were Brave,” with its gorgeous tumbling melody. Returning to guitar, she closed with a slow, tender version of Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),” which ended, pensively, “say good night, say good night, say good night.”
Then she said good night. Nothing more was required.
This article appears in Jan 24-31, 2019.