A friend of mine told me she saw a double bill 15 or so years ago with Michelle Shocked and Billy Bragg. Wow, to paraphrase an old Rodney Dangerfield joke, I went to a protest and a concert broke out. Michelle is on tour again in support of her upcoming album, Soul of My Soul. She landed at Yoshi’s nightclub a week or so ago, and I was fortunate enough to catch the show. She performed with simply herself on acoustic guitar and a friend of a friend, Jo Jo, on electric guitar. Regardless of some prodding about his last name, he remained just Jo Jo.
The set list was about half and half old favorites and tunes from the new album. One of the things I particularly liked was she put a bluesier spin on several of the older songs. If Love Was a Train was, of course, recorded with a blues feel, but she added a heavier treatment to When I Grow Up and The L & N Don’t Stop Here Anymore. Anchorage and Memories of East Texas retained the sound and feel of the original recordings, but with the intimacy of Yoshi’s really became shared stories by a old friend.
Of the new material, I especially like Pompeii and Waterproof. The former is a song about the crassness in today’s society (and came with a poignant tale of her visit to the ruins), while the later is a love song. That’s new for her, and she made it a point to say that she’s never written love songs before, but she has a new man in her life and, well, she wrote a love song. And the song I most want to hear on the new album is one she didn’t perform. She brought her husband up on stage and had him tell the story behind Paperboy. I won’t ruin the ending, but she clearly enjoys how the story comes out.
Michelle herself commented that she’s mellowed out some with age, and there was none of the strident sharpness in her commentaries that I sort of expected. After all, if a trip to San Francisco (scene of the arrest photo on the Short, Sharp, Shocked cover) doesn’t rile her up, she’s clearly moved on. That’s not to say she’s lost her bite, just more an observation she’s perhaps more in line with the views of the Obama generation. That should serve her well with the new album and attract some new fans.
So if you don’t mind a little political commentary in your music, I recommend you see her on the current tour. Clearly there aren’t many singer-songwriters out there who can lay more claim to living the life they sing about than Michelle.
Click here for the Michelle Shocked channel on YouTube.
About the author: I've actually driven from Tehatchapee to Tonopah. And I've seen Dallas from a DC-9 at night.