Billed as ‘An Acoustic Evening With...’, this shared-stage double bill is the fruit of some 30 years’ friendship and frequent past collaborations between two US singer-songwriters – now with eight Grammys between them.
While Carpenter has operated mainly out of Nashville – albeit well on the fringes of its corporate mainstream – and Colvin made her name in New York, their material shares a confessional, personal-into-universal approach that translated readily here into compelling musical chemistry, especially since each has released a particularly soul-baring/soul-searching album this year – Colvin in response to a divorce, Carpenter to a divorce, life-threatening illness and the death of her father. An interlude of suitably self-mocking banter over such sources of inspiration highlighted the hard-won wisdom, acerbic gallows’ humour and breadth of perspective both artists apply to editing their autobiographies into song, with Carpenter’s Chasing What’s Already Gone and Colvin’s current title track All Fall Down among the particular standouts in this respect. With only their own acoustic guitars as accompaniment, the singing, along with the writing, was often a model of eloquent understatement; likewise the unerring harmonic adornment each added to some of the other’s songs, while a few unexpected joint-favourite covers – including Donovan’s Catch the Wind, Paul Simon’s Only Living Boy In New York and the Beatles’ I’ll Be Back – rounded out a winningly intimate performance.
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