Kansas City Star Review

Review: Carrie Rodriguez

The music world is populated by performers who can do it all: sing, write songs and play several instruments and do it all with personality and panache. Some of them are well-known or famous; others aren't and deserve to be -- which is the category Carrie Rodriguez falls into.

Sunday night she visited Knuckleheads, the roadhouse/honky-tonk surrounded by railroad tracks in the East Bottoms. Before a crowd of roughly 120 people, she and her four-man band delivered a warm and lively 80-minute set of songs that showed off her many skills as a singer, musician and live performer.
Rodriguez is touring off the album "Love and Circumstance," a collection of cover songs. She opened with one of those -- Buddy Miller's "Wide River To Cross" -- before returning to tracks from her first two studio albums: "Infinite Night" and "Absence" from the "She Ain't Me" album and "I Don't Want To Play House Anymore," " '50s French Movie" and the title track from their album, "Seven Angels On A Bicycle." Then came one of the better moments of her show: her straight-up version of "Steal Your Love," a song written by one of her more obvious inspirations, Lucinda Williams.
Throughout the set, she switched from fiddle to tenor guitar to electric mandolin, showing off a voice that can switch from bluesy to hymnal within the same song. Her genre is Americana/roots and so is her Texas heritage, so she easily handled songs like Gillian Welch's "I Made A Lover's Prayer" and Merle Haggard's "Today I Started Loving You Again." (She also sang a sultry version of "Happy Birthday" to B2R contributor and music blogger Bill Brownlee that made every guy in the room wish it was his birthday.)
Several of the songs on her setlist were of similar tempo, but she broke the mood with a lively fiddle/mandolin/tambourine instrumental in the middle of the set and then, during her encore, the number "Red Bird," which she performed with opener Jim Lauderdale (it's on his album "Jim Lauderdale & His Bluegrass Band"). She closed her set with a song that she has been performing for years but that she didn't record until she made "Love and Circumstance": the lovely Spanish ballad "Punalada Trapera." The song goes back to her great aunt, Eva Garza, she said before delivering her own lovely version.
Afterward, at the merch table in the back of Knuckleheads, where she signed CDs until her supply was nearly gone, Rodriguez talked about a return trip to Kansas City this summer, when she'll open a show solo/acoustic on a bill that includes Dar Williams, Grace Potter and Sara Watkins.
When a fan suggested that was a bill that rivals this year's revived Lilith Fair, Rodriguez said she'd discussed getting on that roster but it was decided she had no chance. It's their loss, for now, but you've got to believe that sooner or later, tours like that will be soliciting Carrie Rodriguez and not vice versa.
Jim Lauderdale: He came dressed in a slick maroon Manuel suit and opened the evening with a solo-acoustic set that was about as entertaining as a solo-acoustic set can get. It went on a bit too long -- more than an hour -- but he kept it interesting with some corny jokes, a cover of "Lost in the Lonesome Pines" and his own "Hole In My Head," a hit for the Dixie Chicks.
| Timothy Finn, The Star