Dynamic, amusing, informative and memorable — that’s Rebecca Loebe Live.
Released by Virginia-based Goose Creek Music, who (currently) specialize in releasing concert recordings, Live captures half-a-dozen original songs and three covers performed by Austin-based singer-songwriter Rebecca Loebe (vocals, acoustic guitar). It’s leavened by two selections by others, from the complementary Three Nights Live compilation. In addition to Loebe, the latter disc features adopted Austinite Raina Rose (vocals, acoustic guitar) and Fayetteville, Arkansas duo Smokey & The Mirror — Bernice Hembree (vocals, bass) and Bryan Hembree (vocals, electric & acoustic guitar, cajon).
On Live, Loebe opens with a heartfelt interpretation of the cleverly-titled love lost ode “Lie” – “So much for good goodbye’s, I mumble as you try, to paint the door shut on your way” – which was a 2013 download-only single release featuring her Austin band, The New Ordeals. During America’s annual late November celebration, Loebe’s humorous “Thanksgiving” finds the narrator recalling events — good and less so — from the past twelve months. The foregoing song appeared on her The Brooklyn Series EP (2007).
Next up, Loebe offers a pair of restless voyager travelogues, namely, “California” — from Mystery Prize – and “The Chicago Kid” – from Circus Heart (2012). Prior to performing Kurt Cobain’s “Come As You Are,” which she sang on U.S. television during Season 1 of The Voice, in a short introductory narrative ‘Becca describes the contest judges as “four very judgemental pieces of furniture.”
If you’ve been lucky to catch a Rebecca Loebe concert, you’ll know that she is an effervescent performer, with a winning smile and an expressive voice that can scale the heights and drop down on the lows… and rip your heart out when a whispered word or line is required. Doubtless there was a wicked twinkle in her eye while composing the love song “Darlin’,” the opening tune on Circus Heart. Having noted “The smell of your beard in the dark” and such, the lyrical hinge is the subsequent and repeated line, “What did you do to my heart?” The narrator closes with the polite enquiry “When…when can you do it again?”
Loebe’s Mystery Prize (2010) tune “Marguerita” segues with two-minutes of a cover of “California Stars.” The energetic former was inspired by a NPR item about deportees that Rebecca heard – as related in the preceding narrative “An Upbeat Jig…,” while the Woody Guthrie/Jeff Tweedy/Jay Bennett collaboration, from the first Mermaid Avenue collection, possesses an appropriate symbiosis. Raina Rose’s “Swing Wide The Gates” and “Somewhere In The Middle” from Smokey & The Mirror are taken from the Three Nights Live set (also reviewed on ND), and Rebecca’s album closes with a quartet interpretation of Jackson Browne’s four-decade old classic “These Days.”
http://www.goosecreekmusic.com/ and http://www.rebeccaloebe.com/
Brought to you from the desk of the Folk Villager.
