Pierce Pettis
If justice were served, Pierce Pettis and not Steven Curtis Chapman would be the guy headlining at the basketball arena across the river Saturday night and building a room onto his house just to hold all those pesky Doves and Grammys. Then again, the cherubic blond guy hasn't written songs and recorded critically acclaimed albums with the likes of the late Mark Heard, Booker T. (and the MG's) Jones, Los Lobos' David Hidalgo, The Choir's Steve Hindalong and Derri Daugherty, and Dog of Peace (and recent Grammy winner his own self) Gordon Kennedy. But only the small crowd on this cold Minnesota night would've told you that Pierce Pettis wasn't already a star with a whole host of awards, and that didn't seem to bother Pierce. Instead he worked his magic on a crowd of about forty, which was thirty-five more souls than he expected would brave one of winter's last little jabs. Alternating between 6 and prototype 7-string acoustic guitars, Pierce played ten of the thirteen songs from Making Light Of It, his latest album and first in three years. He mixed in a few older songs, a handful of new songs, an old folk song, plenty of stories, and a couple of covers each of Bob Dylan and Mark Heard tunes. Each of the two one-hour sets led off with a Heard song. It took most of the first set and a shot of some nasty organic throat spray to get Pierce's vocal chords warmed up. By the time he pulled off a rockin' "Crash on the Levee" and a touching "Song To Woody" in tribute to Minnesota native Bob Dylan, he seemed to loosen up and wasn't straining for the higher notes. He wrapped the first set with the new album's closer, "Love's Gonna Carry Me Home," co-written with Minnesotan Sally Berres. The first set also featured the new songs "Just Like Jim Brown," a "guy's love song" about walking away on your own terms, and "The Neutral Ground," a tale of love set in New Orleans. After a 15 minute intermission, the second set began with the first three songs from the new album. The third of these, the lovely "Miriam," might be my favorite new Christmas song. The highlight of the evening came a few songs later when a request for "Legacy" was fulfilled. Minnesota audiences are known for their politeness, but there was an extra long pause before the applause began for this portrait of "bigotry as a congenital condition." After a lengthy, humorous introduction, he played a great new song about a canyon near his hometown of Fort Payne, Alabama, where teens used to hang out (with "heads more full of hormones than brains"). He then attempted another request but backed off quickly and apologized for not remembering a lot of his older material. (At the intermission, I overheard him tell someone that he was writing two to three songs a month but really ought to go back and relearn some of his older songs.) The set concluded with "Hold On To That Heart" and "You Move Me," a collaboration with Kennedy which is beginning to nab some mainstream airplay (and VH-1 exposure) for CCM star Susan Ashton. The encore comprised a pair of new songs--the bouncy "All In Good Time," co-written with Clive Gregson, and the wonderful "God Believes in You" ("When you turn your cheek to another fist...", "Everything matters if anything matters at all")--that makes one hope three more years don't pass before the next Pettis album. One also hopes justice shows up soon. Set list
By Dave Draeger |
