Arts and Entertainment
Longley boasts a Berklee shine
By Taylor Coe '13, Arts & Entertainment Editor
October 6, 2011
Romantically, at least, it seems to be a dangerous but productive world for singer-songwriters.
Each artist during last Thursday night’s Acoustic Coffeehouse show in the Fillius Events Barn boasted their share of sob stories—boyfriends who moved on too quickly, barely-remembered alcoholic encounters—but, one might argue, even though the stories were sad, both women at least ended up with some killer tunes.
Thanks to the romantic content, Allison Weiss, who played a solo set to open the show, struck somewhat harder than headliner Liz Longley, who shared the stage with her boyfriend Gus Berry. Despite the emotional resonance of seeing Weiss alone on the stage, her songs clearly lacked some bluster.
While the power-pop craft of her songs was obvious, the deft electric guitars and propulsive drums were conspicuously absent from songs like “Fingers Crossed” off her album …Was Right All Along. Weiss admitted this shortcoming to me in an interview before the show.
“I prefer to play with a full band because my songs are loud and fun,” she explained. “It’s more fun for me on stage to have a band behind me to really flesh out all the instrumentation of the songs.”
In spite of the acoustic setting, Weiss’s pop/punk influences still rang loud and clear throughout her set—stomping her feet along to impassioned guitar strumming with the same sort of acoustic ferocity exhibited by Billy Bragg.
Other, less punky influences also shone through during Weiss’s set. In the middle of her song “Let Me Go,” Weiss told the crowd that she was about to attempt something she had only ever done in practice.
“Has anybody in this room ever been driving around in their car feeling emotional—listening to Top 40 radio—and suddenly a song comes on and it gets you right where it hurts?” she asked the audience. “And you find yourself relating to the lyrics of a 16 year-old boy?
“It happened to me!” she announced gleefully.
That said, she launched into an excellent rendition of Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” complete with an adroit execution of Ludacris’s rap verse.
However, in terms of hip-hop prowess, Liz Longley outshone Weiss’s quick-talking Ludacris impersonation with her song “Dough 4 Dough.” Longley struggled with writing the song, a final assignment for an advanced lyric writing class at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, Mass.
“I kind of procrastinated for a couple weeks because I didn’t know what I was going to write a rap song about,” Longley said. But, drawing from childhood memories of being a Girl Scout and selling cookies, Longley settled on the topic of being a Girl Scout gangster.
That track, of course, is an exception to Longley’s aesthetic. Mostly, her songs are slow, meditative affairs in a traditional singer-songwriter vein. It is telling that the two cover songs on her latest album Hot Loose Wire are by Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison. In true singer-songwriter fashion, there are even delicate references to her idols—the strumming pattern in Longley’s song “Avery” echoes the beginning of Mitchell’s haunting classic “All I Want.”
But hiding underneath that folk-pop aesthetic is a songwriter with a seemingly innate sense of experimental songwriting. “Skin and Bones,” a rootsy bluegrass tune about another bad boyfriend, reflects this element in Longley’s music.
“It came out bluegrass, I don’t know why,” Longley said of “Skin and Bones” during the concert. In light of her admission, Longley elevated the song out of a genre exercise into something more like a straight artistic expression. The bluegrass component, as she explained it, was not so much a trick of the trade as it was a spontaneous adaptation.
It is worth noting that despite any such “straightness” of artistic expression, the song was always destined to be a trope—“skin and bones” is, after all, a cliché so embedded in the American tradition that most writers actively seek to avoid it. But the song has some genuine feeling once Longley shakes you off of the icky feeling that she might have written it for class credit or an after school project.
But even understanding “Skin and Bones” as a vaguely scholarly enterprise in bluegrass composition, Longley clearly has skills that reach beyond songwriting. Perhaps her guitar work leaves a little to be desired in the world of bluegrass, but her vocals blazed clearly and brightly.
She doesn’t quite have the chops of an Alison Krauss (then again, who does?), but she certainly has the spirit and stage presence to carry a show.