Last night I had the great pleasure of seeing one of my favorite singers, Erin McKeown, live in concert at Club Passim. The usual fact about good live performances was true-- it is striking how much even songs I don't particularly like recorded improve upon being played live. (E.g., "You Were Right About Everything.")

She played a lot of my favorite things from her new album, Sing You Sinners, which is a fun and rock-y rendition of old jazz standards (and closed out her encore with "Rhode Island is Famous for You," which I was pleased to see the rest of the crowd loved as much as I do).

She also suggested that part of what makes the standards so rewarding to record is that the lyrics are so carefully crafted, so structured, and so inviolate, that they give the song a backbone which allows her to do basically anything to the rest of the song without messing it up. She didn't say this, but it is presumably the same reason that so many great poets love (and excel in) tight forms, like the villanelle or the sonnet.

The rest of her tour schedule is available on her website. Here is Terry Teachout's favorable review of Sing You Sinners. Here is Our Girl in Chicago's rave review of a McKeown concert in Chicago:

[W]hat you really need to do, if you want an instant new pop hero, is catch McKeown live. ... When I went to the Chicago show in September, having sampled her work on line, I wasn't ready for the full force of McKeown's charisma and talent. She turned out to be everything I was expecting: funky, quirky, smart, and eclectic. But she was something else over and above all that: the lady was fierce. Fiercely energetic, fiercely commanding, fiercely original. We were all in her pocket from the first number, and increasingly ecstatic throughout.

One I've posted in recent memory, but's worth reading:

IV from No. 4 of "Four Quartets", Little Gidding
TS Eliot

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
     Lies in the choice of pyre or* pyre—
     To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
     We only live, only suspire
     Consumed by either fire or fire.

UPDATE: Note the correction of "of" to "or"--completely missed by me, but pointed out by a discriminating reader...