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Near the end of this gig in front of an awestruck bunch of University students, Beki Hemingway covers Maria McKee's "Life Is Sweet" and cites her as a major influence. It makes sense. Both have a stunning range not only musically but emotionally. Their similarly powerful voices are cut from the very same heavenly cloth before being sown into the very fabric of earth. It is that sense of earthiness and how real everything about her is that makes Hemingway stand out from what these kids are used to hearing. Their charts are filled with shallow vignettes on love and sex, and their churches are coming down with otherworldly sanitized clichés. Here right between the two is a woman of faith dealing with ugliness, belonging, tragedy, death and hope in ways that shakes up emotions but always leaves the listener inspired to believe.

Another thing that stands out is balance. She follows a song about how her mother made her the coolest kid on the block, "Fort Bragg," with a cover version of a friend's song "I'm Ugly." She follows up her meditation on the prophet Isaiah's thought that the heart is deceitful, "Sinsick," with a song about her and her friend Siouxanne racing off to find a place of grace. She tells a story about how she had to move out of the friend's house she was renting because of her father's death and while asking how she would deal with such a tragedy she gets a call to say her own father had died. She talks a lot about death, but the death of her mother's friend Barbara is the inspiration to the concluding "Floating Away" which turns death into something worth looking forward to if not pursuing!

It is the Siouxanne song that best shows the craft of her writing. It is poetic and clever yet never contrived or too indecipherably wordy. Siouxanne was the friend at school that every parent feared their child getting close to. The friendship that Beki formed was totally based around their musical tastes, and this song longs for a reunion where Soiuxanne would leave her drinking lover and Beki her parents in fear so that they could run off to a place where they would not be judged as too wild or too straight laced but behind the covers they would find a place of grace and love and belonging. It is powerfully profound and have I said it yet, earthed and real.

On record Hemingway is all band and rocks, which, of course, her voice is made for. An interesting project, while she writes her next album, might be to release these acoustic gigs that America and now Ireland have been treated to for the past six months. With her husband Randy Kerkman playing deceptively simple rhythms and licks there is something about these arrangements of the songs that the world needs the opportunity to hear. Come on Beki, you could call it Earthed and Real!