Classic meets modern at Lambert show
The success of Miranda Lambert in concert is bringing more steak than sizzle.
Here’s a country star who could wind a crowd up with fire and confetti cannons if she wanted to. She could arrange the set list to manipulate the crowd’s emotions.
She could act like a ringmaster at a three-ring circus.
But because her songs and her character have substance, she came out like a local act playing for friends; like a talented next door neighbour not a girl-nextdoor fantasy. She didn’t oversell herself as a commodity, she didn’t use any artistic slight of hand to inflate her marketing profile, she just kept pinning hit after hit on the audience until CN Centre was her own personal jukebox.
It started before Lambert even came on stage. What’s a responsible modern hit-maker to do if she wants to show her roots and the roots of modern country music itself? Start with a vintage film clip of Sister Loretta Tharpe, the godmother of all this stuff we listen to these days. Tharpe influenced everyone from Chuck Berry to Elvis Presley, Little Richard to Jerry Lee Lewis. Lambert wanted everyone to know that the founders of today’s country rock also had their founders, and Tharpe was one of the biggest.
Lambert started things off clad conspicuously in a “hell yeah” grin and a robin’s egg Gibson guitar that Tharpe might have played back in her era.
The vintage cred continued to build as the sound of the band frequently included banjo twang, the wash-over murmur of an organ, the sweet whine of slide guitar, and that ghostly echo on the guitar that harkens to a black-and-white era. Torch country. Keith Urban is doing it, too, with songs like Blue Ain’t Your Colour. Lindi Ortega is making a career out of it.
She did it again on the solo acoustic ballad Tin Man that brought the house down. The crowd sang along in full force. And it was the first song of the encore.
She followed that up with U2’s powerful lyrical rocket I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For where organist (he’s a talented solo artist in his own right) Danny Mitchell got a surprise vocal showcase, as did backup vocalist Gwen Sebastian (she got to do a whole song by herself, the Lambert co-composition Cadillac) and even one of the crew members got in on the vocal action (and he was good!).
It wasn’t a cover, it was a revisioning that proved how an authentic performer can freeze a song in time no matter what the genre.
That is to say, Mama’s Broken Heart was not dangled in front of our subconscious eyes until the last possible moment.
She played that definitive tune at the midway point. It’s one of those songs that’s bigger than a mere hit. It is at once a country anthem for our times and an antithesis to the other country music of our times. It still demonstrates the telling of a story. It proves that revealing a character and artfully constructing a scene will blow the charts up if it’s quality material.
And because Lambert is an artist of longstanding quality, there were plenty of other hits to also populate the night.
Her character showed as well when, only two songs into her set, a fight broke out in the fifth row. The band never missed a note, but she halted her vocals and orchestrated the security response to the fisticuffs before sliding right back into the flow of the song once the nutters were ejected.
She gave the audience another personal moment when we all sang a crowd rendition of Happy Birthday to sizzling lead guitarist Alex Weeden.
Another takeaway happened when she and Sebastian called opening act Brandy Clark (wow, what a talent, such a writer and substantial performer, a true Nashville asset) to the stage and as a trio did a cover of Shania Twain’s No One Needs To Know Right Now. Again, the crowd joined in and sang the entire song in full voice. The only thing missing was a campfire and some s’mores.
Lambert was a master at infusing each live song with a little extra zing than the studio version. Little Red Wagon had a blues-rock Fabulous Thunderbirds feel. Gunpowder & Lead could have been a Nickelback barroom blast. During Tin Man, if you closed your eyes, you’d swear it was Dolly Parton in 1978.
Lambert is as bonafide and timeless an artist as country music has these days. She keeps her sound rooted in the golden fields of the genre’s downhome origins, yet transcends to universal audiences. That’s what truth will do. That’s what happens when artists remember the first three letters of that word.