Flashback to last Summer's LIC music – Melissa Ahern at LIC Bar on July 12, 2009: I was only there because of her. Well – her, and the beer and the sun. But sun-and-beer was everywhere in LIC this weekend. Melissa Ahern has made fewer appearances than they, even given this extended, soggy, grey spring.
As soon as I saw her name listed as a last-minute substitute for her estimable brother (Andy Stack, on tour with Jonah Smith) in the Sunday BBQ series at LIC Bar, I resolved to show up, beer money or no. Having heard her perform briefly twice, singing her own material in a vulnerable alto, and a couple of covers with a wry swagger, I was eager to assess her at the length of a full set.
Subtly stunning. Ahern, a singer-songwriter backed today by bass and percussion, worked in a tough atmosphere for her genre: the courtyard at LIC Bar most rewards the raucous, the electric, the party-atmosphere-creator, on days like this. Her gentle, almost reluctant voice, her relatively basic strumming, could get lost in glass-clinking and chatter. As one drunk, yet not nasty, patron shouted, “Sing it out!” But no, that wouldn’t have done, and Ahern wasn’t going to subvert her material like that.
Instead, she stayed with her pastels (not normally a term of approbation with me for anyone but Debussy). But these pastels covered strength and depth. Ahern gained momentum during a Meet The Beatles-esque arrangement of “Till There Was You”, performing what had been even then a half-ironic tribute to a lame cliché with verve and swing. Her voice gained a richer timbre as she loosed to her task. By the time she sang her “Rules of Improv”, which uses a coffee stain on a sweater as a gateway into a fresh examination of the ground reality of relationships, she was floating beyond the setting.
As Ahern continued, her off-center tunes – the kind with unexpected, then inevitable melodies – framed lyrics built on casual remarks: asides that penetrate, funny, real; it twisted out of her, eyes rolling to the cerulean sky, shoulder dipping, mouth gnarling. Her poetic “Talk in Circles”, a short song impossible to summarize, raveled the wide world and the tightest relationships through rhythmic hesitation and a stop-and-start melodic line reflecting both its character’s dawning insights and its performer’s idiosyncrasies. All of it was as warm as her syrupy-lazy and wise take on “Dock of the Bay”. And she can whistle, too.
An accomplished veteran musician – needing to be off to meet with an Austin hiphop producer, another plotline entirely – lingered two songs into her set, and remarked immediately on her quality. Probably he’s used to noticing what’s not pushed into plain sight. Maybe we can blame our rare sightings of sun on global warming, or Goldman Sachs (name your bogeyman); rare Ahern sightings are more comprehendible, as she’s at the earliest beginnings of a story that will arc - oh, who can guess how high right now. But I won’t be the only one there, wherever, only because it’s her.
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The Silver Shark is always moving, just under the surface of the LIC scene. He comes up suddenly to snap up some wine and music, and perhaps bare his teeth at nearby lovely mermaids – though he generally doesn't bite. You can catch an occasional glimpse of him at your favorite LIC venue, and regularly here at his blog.
