The Finger Picking Chanteuse

Marissa Nadler goes solo at Crystal Ballroom on Sunday, 14 May 2023.

Local Glenn Jones joins the finger frenzy.

It was a sleepy Sunday night in Davis Square. School’s out for the summer as Boston and beyond remembers what the show landscape is like without a few extra layers of undergraduates filling the glass to the brim.

So what’s it like? A lot less crowded, easier to get a drink at the bar, and more chances for the gray hairs to worm their way closer to the stage. The perfect atmosphere for the folkheads and finger-picking nerds to take in a double-stack bill with Marissa Nadler and Glenn Jones.

Enjoy it while you can, gray hairs. For the next couple of months or so, most of the music dollars for the 18-24 demographic will flow to the outdoor summer festivals. Let the kids have their fun beneath the scorching sun – the oldheads know the music sounds just as sweet (better!) without the gnarly perfume of porta potties, patchouli, and vape sweat.

And if you needed a closing argument: air-conditioning.

Glenn Jones

Local Piedmont-style guitar maestro Glenn Jones reported he lived within a 10-minute walk from the Crystal Ballroom. We’ve created a map to track all the territory within a 10-minute walk of Davis Square as a helpful tool for potential stalkers. Enjoy!

Anyway, what is the Piedmont style? Wikipedia is really glad you asked:

“Piedmont blues (also known as East Coast, or Southeastern blues) refers primarily to a guitar style, which is characterized by a fingerpicking approach in which a regular, alternating thumb bass string rhythmic pattern supports a syncopated melody using the treble strings generally picked with the fore-finger, occasionally others. The result is comparable in sound to ragtime or stride piano styles.”

Thanks, Wikipedia! We can’t know for sure how comfortable with this description Jones would be without asking him. But the syncopated melodies were in plain evidence in Sunday night’s set. The musician switched between acoustic guitars and banjos, let his fingers do the walking and his mouth do the talking, regaling the crowd with song and stories about his lifelong investigation into the picking arts.

Included in the set were songs from his recent album Vade Mecum and a mellow jammer about his two cats, played in the Pied-meow-nt style.

Marissa Nadler

Marissa Nadler floated into the Crystal Ballroom on the back of a cloud. There’s something otherworldly about her sound, incorporating elements from the heights and depths of the soul. A spiritual sound dressed up for clubbing.

You can hear the contrarian aspects in her recent LP The Path of Clouds. The heart of her art is a love for finger picking that she shares with the opening act Glenn Jones.

But take the folky architecture, build it out with rock and pop notions, and have a smoky chanteuse move in - then you have something like the Marissa Nadler experience.

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The Finger Picking Chanteuse

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Shades of Julee Cruise. This is music that would feel right at home onstage at the Bang Bang Bar in the closing credits of Season Three of Twin Peaks. Transcendent beauty, high elevation vibrations, though Nadler struggled to reproduce the illusion of a full band sound as a solo act.

Sometimes less is more, and all those fancy effects pedals at your feet just get in the way. Sometimes more is more, and you need every gewgaw under the moon.

Pick your poison…