Robert Earl Keen/Tift Merritt live!

Robert Earl Keen
Joe’s, Chicago
Saturday, June 16, 2007

Tift Merritt
Old Town School Of Folk Music, Chicago
Sunday, June 17, 2007

It goes without saying us hipsters in the upper Midwest prefer a more interesting brand of country music. But often shut out of our system are fringe players who aren’t radical enough for the insurgent crowd nor glossy enough for crossover fans. Robert Earl Keen and Tift Merritt exist in a sort of vacuum.

You could say Keen lives in an alternate reality when he comes to Chicago. His Saturday gig at Joe’s was — like the last 10 visits here — largely populated by transplanted Texans. The response afforded his opener, “Think It Over,” was met with the yahooing befitting a native son. Keen used to need time to thaw when he started visiting the city on a regular basis a couple years ago, but needed no such warm up at Joe’s.

Touring in anticipation of Best, due on the 26th from Koch, Keen glided through a greatest-hits-style song selection. From “Corpus Christi Bay” to “Feelin’ Good Again” he ran out the regulars with confidence, ducking down for a brief acoustic set of “Merry Christmas From The Family” and “Front Porch Song.” It was as loose and commanding a performance as he has ever given here. The trotting out of “The Road Goes On Forever” as a closer has become anticlimactic, but Keen fans like to know what they’re getting. Let’s hope Saturday set the new standard.

Tift Merritt, conversely, is at a crossroads. Three years have elapsed since her last studio album, Tambourine (Lost Highway), and even it was a reinvention of the conventional songstress revealed on her debut. Sunday she referred to being on a hiatus and promised she was going into the recording studio soon, but still her set felt up-for-grabs and somewhat experimental.

Using a rapt, storyteller-primed audience to her advantage, Merritt goofed her way through a gaggle of tunes and shucked their recorded arrangements. “Good Hearted Man” moved out of Memphis and over to the piano bench, while “Virginia, No One Can Warn You” gained a tense energy from her refusal to stay still behind the mic. Freed up by not having a backing band, she popped in new songs while feeling her way among the older ones. The very embodiment of her time away, “Another Country” was filled with the pain of distance and she later used it as a springboard into “breaking all the country music rules” with a tune sung entirely in French.

Her constant movement from acoustic guitar, to a cappella Gospel, to piano, to harmonica continued to suggest Merritt was willing to try anything to get back on track. But this “ad hoc” setlist did close with a poignant clue, and one sung so the audience wouldn’t miss it: “I know what I’m looking for now.”

— Steve Forstneger

Category: Live Reviews, Weekly