Venue: The Triple Door - Seattle, WA
Date: February 17, 2006
The last time I saw Susan Werner live was in the courtyard between the Twin Towers in New York, the summer before the buildings were destroyed. Susan’s set that night was colored mostly by songs about love and longing, heartbreak, and deceit. Her tunes then were sad, reflective, and heart-wrenching folk songs. She showed a natural mastery of guitar, piano, and vocals.
Susan Werner does Jazz
But the world has changed since then, and so has Susan Werner. Since then, she’s released an album of old school jazz vocal tunes (I Can’t Be New). As she describes it at this show, it’s a collection of “songs that sound like they’re from the 20s and the 30s … because [she figured] most of the competition is dead.”
The first set tonight is from that record, and Werner is dressed in her jazzy all-black duds. She starts this set out with the snarky vocals-and-piano number, “Don’t Work With Your Friends” (which actually isn’t on I Can’t Be New).
Highlights of Her Jazz Set
From there, the audience is captivated as Werner moves through her sentimental jazz tunes. During “Let’s Regret This In Advance,” she decorates the song with the trumpet noises she makes using her mouth. The home-made trumpet sound thing is something folksingers tend to implement now and then, and it’s always a crowd pleaser.
Other highlights of set one include “Stay On Your Side of Town,” and a slowed-down candlelight version of “Philanthropy,” which she dedicates to a couple sitting near me and my friend. Her performance of the ode on her hometown, “Give Me Chicago,” provokes the audience to call out cities for her to make up rhymes to (“The thought of Tulsa is just repulsa / Give me Chicago any day”). Werner gets stumped when someone calls out Puyallup (a small town outside of Tacoma, WA, pronounced pyoo-WALL-ip), and the crowd giggles at the balk.
Set Two: Folksinger
For the second set, Werner returns to the stage in her folksinger outfit: jeans, a t-shirt, and a denim jacket. Here, she begins with the crowd favorite, “Time Between Trains,” which ends with an emphatic crowd-wide whistle-along.
Though set two showcases work so different from its predecessor, there’s no moment of discomfort. As the signs outside the club announce, Werner is “a complete musician,” with a mastery of her instruments. During the course of set two, at some point, we begin to realize it’s not about what kind of music she’s playing. Werner is just good at writing great songs.
“Barbed Wire Boys” gets everyone choked up. Somewhere in the middle of this set, she does a three-song tribute to spirituality, complete with a cheeky, bastardized version of the Lord’s Prayer (“Lead us not into temptation, and deliver us from those who follow You”) that gets the whole crowd singing along.
She ends the show with a new tune, which she introduces as “a love song.” “My Strange Nation” (“My frustration is just a product of my strange but loyal love for this land … for its freedom of dissent, for its greasy government”) is probably one of the most eloquent “subversive” tributes to America by a folksinger since “This Land is Your Land.” The audience in Seattle is impressed, and calls her out for a second wind.
Encore
For the encore, Werner switches gears from political satire to a heart-felt love of a different kind. Humor is important sometimes because it can make something memorable. But Werner proves that her work is memorable whether she's making you laugh or just telling the honest truth. She closes her encore with "Never My Love" - a song about staying true to a partner.
Even with the encore, the crowd wants more, but Werner ends it there. It's a wonder, given her incredible performance, mastery of her craft, and her comfortable presence onstage, that there's not a larger crowd. Maybe next time.
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