Some things can’t be taught. How to seduce an audience in a bar where the sunlight streams through the windows somewhere in the West Village is one of them.
But the terrific young folkie Christopher Paul Stelling just knows how to do it. He jokes with the audience, compliments the bartender for the bloody mary and steps away from the mic because … well, because he thinks his voice can simply carry the afternoon. And he is right. On record, Chris has an Okie twang, but in person it is a nasal depth: like early Dylan if Dylan could carry a tune.
Early on he performs a wondrous thing called (?) “Tomorrow I’m leaving For Memphis” and he picks his battered old guitar on the Flamenco based rhythm. It is unpretentious and poetic. Lovely. And “Flawless executioner” where he doesn’t go within a mile of the mic is so good it could be the Newport Jazz festival 1962 or Woodstock 1968 though with talisman’s around his neck and a ponytail, it might be his visage as well as his sound that feels outside time.
His worse songs on the other hands… Put it this way, half of these songs are melodic jewels reminiscent of a deeper Donavon, the other half are rhythmic Ritchie Havens like workouts. Chris stamps his feet in time, raises his voice and bashes his guitar on those and though I wastly prefer Donovon to Havens, I am still impressed by workouts Also, the singer turns off the intensity between the songs and instead of losing the tension of the set he effortlessly elongates it. Havens seems insincere but Stelling never does.
As a lyricist Chris is an interesting case. A storyteller given more to the prosaic than to the poetic: there is something strangely in between on his lyric: it is as if he imagines oceans and dust roads without actually seeing them. Like he is staring out a Brooklyn tenement and imagining a world he has only read about. The result is there is something concrete in his naturalism. Very effective stuff and never more so in a beaut of a song in which a resurrection occurs at sea: the metaphor seeming to double back on itself.
A little later he calls a girl named Julia on stage with him and just before that he performs a dynamic “Strange Bedfellows” -already re-arranged from the recorded version. With his scruffy beard and intense blue eyes, Chris looks like a messianic psycho killer.
He sure killed us today with a first class set.