February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
It was an ideal balance between relaxed confidence and disciplined expertise, and Brady was emboldened by the standing-room-only crowd, who often responded viscerally to his songs.
No one missed the presence of a backing band, and going strictly solo had the advantage of keeping the spotlight, literally and figuratively, on him as a singer, composer, and instrumentalist. The sometimes oversweet pop veneer of his recordings was stripped from the songs, making even the most familiar seem like fresh, taut dispatches from the soul.
Brady began not with his “hits” but with three songs that have fallen below many critics’ radar. In “Blue World,” a song from his 1991 album “Trick or Treat,” he sang with blunt, self-preserving resolve, “I don’t want to paint your picture / I don’t want to write your dreams / I ain’t here to sing your sorrows / Your blue world is not my scene.”
In “I Want You to Want Me,” from his 1995 album “Spirits Colliding,” Brady sang of the physical ache of love exacerbated by games of the heart. It’s no surprise, then, why “spirits colliding” have trouble connecting.
Then he shifted into a deceptively breezy “Sea of Love,” a song from his 2001 album “Oh What a World.” Love’s dilemma reared up again, making the narrator “frightened to go, frightened to stay.”
The first “hit” Brady sang was “Nobody Knows,” a brooding, bluesy meditation on expectations never realized. Part of the song’s power flows from his perfectly modulated inflection and from a thought-provoking chorus that begins, “Nobody knows why Elvis threw it all away / Nobody knows what Ruby had to hide.”
Switching from guitar to keyboards, Brady admitted that a book on Indian mysticism was a spark for “Paradise Is Here.” He sang it with a simmering fervor not quite at the R&B-burning level of Tina Turner’s popular cover but enough to erase Cher’s pop-tripe rendition from memory. Even “The Long Goodbye,” an unabashed pop song he wrote and recorded with Ronan Keating, became something leaner this night, confection melting away to confession.
Back on acoustic guitar, an instrument on which he still has few peers in Irish music, Brady tore a page from his own history of living as an Irishman in London during the early 1970s. That song, “Nothing But the Same Old Story,” has lost none of its bite since he first recorded it 21 years ago. It deserves its status as a classic, with lines like “In their eyes, we’re nothing but a bunch of murderers” slicing straight to the bone.
“The Island” has been covered by a slew of other artists, including Caherlistrane’s Dolores Keane, but Brady put his own indelible stamp on it and offered a deeper layer of emotion. The song’s melodic beauty and the Edenic getaway he describes in it intentionally clash with the stark harshness of other imagery (“trying to carve tomorrow from a tombstone,” “twisted wreckage down on Main Street”), leaving the listener all the more haunted by the disparity between what is and what could be.
The success of Brady’s pop-rock songwriting since his “Hard Station” recording in 1981 must be considered side by side with his prior accomplishments as one of Ireland’s finest traditional musicians. He reminded his audience of that period with the release this year of “The Liberty Tapes,” a 1978 Dublin concert that launched his solo trad album, “Welcome Here, Kind Stranger.”
At the Village Underground, even when he forgot a lyric in “Arthur McBride,” a traditional song he’ll always be linked to, Brady could laugh it off. He recovered with effortless poise, as if he were singing in his living room, and in a sense, with the audience so firmly in his pocket, he was.
His singing of “The Lakes of Pontchartrain” was stirring and spot-on, and the improvised coda of “The Homes of Donegal,” where he rattles off that county’s towns and villages in a Van Morrison-like riff, brought hoots of acknowledgment from the crowd, who sang in roaring, sustained unison the choral “Don-e-gal.”
In his verse, National Book Award-winning poet Alan Dugan touts the ability “to walk out bravely into the daily accident.” In his own verses, Paul Brady knows all too well what Dugan means, as this memorable, retrospective solo performance — full of great songs, singing, and guitar work — proved.
Set hed:
Trad, dance communities rally
for ailing Margie O’Driscoll
There’s no shortage of good-cause benefits, but one that has understandably preoccupied New York and New Jersey’s traditional music and dance community is this Sunday’s benefit concert and c