Damien Jurado Live Review Photos

Damien Jurado Live Review & Photos | Backbooth, Orlando, FL | November 19, 2016

by • November 21, 2016

There’s a certain quiet, commanding grace that’s established when you allow your music to do all the talking for you. Damien Jurado knows and understands this all too well.

He eventually got around to addressing his rapt Backbooth audience Saturday night, but he wasn’t in any hurry. Besides, there were songs that needed singing. After starting things off with the quietest take on “Working Titles” these ears have ever heard, he offered song after song, no set list in sight. Sometimes he’d morph one tune right into the next before pausing for any applause. And we didn’t mind.

Damien Jurado Live Review Photos

He’s one of the few performers in our midst (Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam among them) to have the ability to silence a noisy bar with this sometimes quiet, sometimes not catalog of music. We put away our chitchat, held our collective breath, and chose to listen harder than normal. We hung on his words, lest we miss what it was he had to share. His songs do often come out dressed as secrets. He’s probably used to this hush falling over the crowd after his 20 years of touring, but it’s incredible to witness all the same. It’s transfixing, akin to magic even.

When he did see fit to talk to us, it’d been 45 minutes since he’d taken the stage. He had something important he wanted to share, and it had everything to do with whistling. He’d whistled a verse or two of a song to fairly thunderous applause, but confessed afterward it’s not so easy to do. Some nights the whistling just sounds better than others. Sometimes his throat outright hurts and he can’t quite manage to go as high as he wants to.

And I haven’t been [to Orlando] in four years,” he said. “I owe it to you to hit these notes.”

To his credit, it felt like he didn’t miss a note all night. And considering this was the night preceding the last show of the tour, he could have cashed in his chips and missed a few. Instead, he did the opposite. He gave us deadpan jokes. He reverse heckled certain loud people in the crowd (you know who you are, Carl). He gave us a sports rant. And he gave us a healthy smattering of his songs old and new (nearly every tune off of 2012’s Maraquopa, for example); he even threw in half of a Black Flag cover while tuning his guitar (“Nervous Breakdown”). There were few limits.

Requests were regularly yelled out; they were rarely accepted and usually denied (“I love that you love that song, but I never do that one”). “Cloudy Shoes” and “Everything Trying” were personal high points in the mix, but it’s hard to place any one above the other. It felt like a greatest hits kind of a night. If you’ve listened to his music over the past six years or so, you heard a lot of what you were hoping to hear over his hour-and-a-half of playing. How’s that for reliability?

Damien Jurado Live Review Photos

It’s unfortunate we only get to see Damien poke his head around our city and state every four years. This is a rare caliber of singer-songwriter. He makes a microphone and acoustic guitar sound as colossal and full as a stage filled with musicians. He has the power to manipulate his voice and sound completely different from one song to the next, skipping rather nimbly from one style to another. And instead of leaning on distracting effects or pedals, he gives us the next best possible thing: strong, sad, intimate, raw, tender, dark tales that completely envelop us and draw us in. It’s uncommon, and that makes it all the more alluring. And for that, we move closer. We can’t help but want to prolong whatever it is he has to give.

Perhaps we just need to pack our bags and umbrellas and take more visits to his native Seattle. How else are we going to manage more delightfully sad shows like this one? Sad lullabies will always have their place, after all.

Opening the night were local Matthew Fowler and (decidedly not local) Doug Keith who each offered comfortable acoustic tunes and uncomfortable banter in fairly equal amounts. Fowler is a real sweetheart of a guy and Keith was good enough to merit a second and third look and listen. Go ahead and add both of them to your “learn and listen to more” lists.

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Damien Jurado Live Review by Dainon, edited by Matthew Weller.

Damien Jurado Live Photos by Ryan Snyder

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