At first playing a powder blue electric mandolin and then a guitar — whose plug fell out at least once; you couldn’t hear much of what she was adding on strings either way — Cook concentrated on her sharp lyrics, which were often muddied inside those hard-charging arrangements.
Cook has crafted some strong anthems, from “Thick Georgia Woman” to kick off the set; the popular “El Camino” mid-show and the triumphant “Sometimes It Takes Balls to be a Woman” to end her encore. When it came time for a cover, she went not to any of the classic country she plays on the air, but the Velvet Underground. Nice to hear “Sunday Morning” anyway.
I had completely expected her to work up some sort of tribute to Nancy Griffith after the surprising announcement of that singer’s death the day before. Like Griffith, Cook had been a pet favorite on David Letterman and been on a number of times.
Cook did recall early in the show how Griffith helped arrange an opening gig for her at the Birchmere in Alexandria years ago — the first time she had played the D.C. area. She said she was dedicating the night’s set to her. But she didn’t play any of her songs.
Presumably she had carefully rehearsed what she wanted to play with her band before setting out on the road and couldn’t handle the spontaneity of an added tribute.
Cook’s carefully written songs, rich with detail, are certainly from the same literary-minded corner Griffith with memorable lines like “Passed out on the concrete porch ‘ Love sure is a bitch when your liver is scorched” from “Stanley by God Terry” or “If I wake up married, I’ll have to annul it / Right now my hands are in his mullet” from “El Camino.”
As it was, she performed solo with guitar just once in the show, at the start of her encore. And it stood out just as it does on “Aftermath.” “Mary, the Submissing Years” was slyly written as a kind of answer song to John Prine’s “Jesus the Missing Years.” Half-narrated in her transfixing drawl (which she uses on voice overs as well as radio), she imagines the life of the mother of Jesus as transported to today. It’s got the detail of a Flannery O’Connor and a lilting chorus. As she got to its end, she stopped mid-lyric and paused, bowing her head, almost as if she were overcome with emotion or memory. Nope. She had forgotten the words. So the parable ended with another chorus and no resolution.
Cook did something in her show artists don’t do much any more — introducing new songs that had yet to be recorded. Phone cams had made it easy for fans to record and prematurely share them. One of them, about her sister, was paired to her earlier, hard-hitting “Heroin Addict Sister,” showing an approach reflected in its title, “Lightly.”
Cook’s best material is infused with a hard-lived life that has included divorce, prison time and death in her family (as well as the aforementioned afflictions of her sister). Her parents had been barroom honkey tonk singers after her dad got out of prison.
Her opening act had an even more memorable back story. His mother, a Grammy-winning country star, his dad the guitarist for Willie Nelson. He knew neither of them early in his life, since he was raised by an abusive aunt. But there was reconciliation and later his own meth addiction.
Sixteen years passed between the first album from Waylon Payne and its more recent second one, a largely personal testimony of redemption. And Payne paused a couple of times in his set to marvel at the fact that an Eastern Seaboard audience of strangers were familiar and singing along to songs he had recorded on his own during a pandemic.
It was more pronounced on his opening “Sins of the Father.” “You haven’t lived until you had a song on the radio and sung back to you,” he smiled.
When someone yelled “whoo” during another new song, it threw him altogether.
Payne has the voice and direct approach of a classic country star, though he threw many by appearing barefoot. “The boots didn’t go with the suit.” But it wasn’t just that he was barefoot; he’d raise his legs and point his toes like a dancer, wiggle toes at other points or entwine the stool with them when he was sitting at a stool. It was so unusual it almost became distracting.
Payne is also one of the few out gay performers in country, though that part was so subtle on stage it came through only in the pronouns of the love songs. Among his strong originals, mostly from his most recent album, Blue eyes, The Harlot, The Queer, The Pusher & Me, was the cover of “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” a No. 1 for his mother Sammi Smith in 1971.
That he returned, now fully shod, as a guest during Cook’s encore, to take over a song with her band — “All the Trouble,” which he wrote with Lee Ann Womack — indicated he might have a had a better handle on this Saturday night country show thing than the headliner.
Elizabeth Cook setlist:
- “Thick Georgia Woman”
- “The Perfect Girls of Pop”
- “Stanley By God Terry”
- Half Hanged Mary”
- Daddy I’ve Got Love for You”
- “Bayonette”
- “Bad Decisions”
- “Exodus of Venus”
- “Slow Pain”
- “El Camino”
- “Heroin Addict Sister”
- “Lightly”
- “Feverfew”
- “Sunday Morning”
- “These Days”
- “Bones”
- “Mary the Submissive Years”
- “All the Trouble”
- “Balls”
Waylon Payne setlist:
- “Sins of the Father”
- “Dead on the Wheel”
- “Born to Lose”
- “Help Me Make It Through the Night”
- “Shiver”
- “Old Blue Eyes”
- “Santa Ana Winds”
- “Pretender”
- “Back from the Grave”
