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Concert Review: Shawn Colvin at City Winery, NY
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 26 October 2012 10:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
For the past few years, Grammy winning singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin has made the 
intimate Soho club City Winery her base when playing New York City during her annual fall “residency.” (She also comes to Chicago’s own City Winery for concerts on November 7 and 8.)
It was no different on October 25, the first of a four-night residency through October 28. For 100 minutes, Colvin held her audience in thrall with just her voice, acoustic guitar and pocketful of superb songs: for the second half of the concert, she was joined by Mary Chapin Carpenter, whose low harmonies beautifully accentuated Colvin’s own voice. The pair had just flown back from an eight-show run in England, Ireland and Scotland—but jetlag was nowhere in evidence.
Colvin, whose latest Nonesuch album, All Fall Down, came out in June—following a six-year hiatus after the release of These Four Walls—writes deceptively simple songs that incisively dissect relationships with straightforward but cutting lyrics. On display was a trio of melancholy tunes from the new record, “Knowing What I Know Now,” “Seven Time’s the Charm” and “Change Is on the Way.” Colvin, whose engagingly chatty banter between songs is an essential component of her live shows, wryly noted that she got one of her few upbeat songs, “Fill Me Up,” out of the way early in order to fool her fans into thinking she’s a “happy” performer.
But her fans are as savvy as she, and she knows it: in addition to her songwriting talent, Colvin also is a terrific cover artist—it’s not for nothing that an early album of hers, Cover Girl, comprised tunes of artists like the Police, Talking Heads and Greg Brown, whose “One Cool Remove” was a highlight of the evening. For this concert, Colvin balanced eight originals with nine covers, beginning with her signature re-working of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.”
Colvin and Carpenter were at their vocal best during the four-song covers-only encore, beginning with a stark, emotional version of the Beatles’ “I’ll Be Back” and ending with, according to Colvin, “the sweetest song we know”: Willie Nelson’s “That’s the Way Love Goes.”
Shawn Colvin
October 25-28, 2012
City Winery, New York, NY
November 7-8, 2012
City Winery, Chicago, IL
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