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Concert reviews Music

Michael Hurley’s gentle power

MICHAEL HURLEY and FIVER at the Tranzac, Friday, April 22. Rating: NNNNN


It’s incredibly inspiring to see a true original. That’s what a sold-out Tranzac witnessed on Friday night (and at Geary Lane on Saturday night), where Michael Hurley played Toronto for the first time in his 50 years of making his own special kind of folk music.

You get the sense that the 75-year-old never plays any of his songs the same way each time, and the tunes themselves seem written with instinct rather than tradition in mind. They come across with an almost nursery-rhyme simplicity and vulnerability but in fact often have odd time signatures and phrasings, lyrics conveying hard times as much as colourful offbeatness, and melodies that swing upwards into yodelling or a mournful howl when you’re least expecting it.

The show was part of Invocation’s Quiet Quiet Annex Lights series, and, between Fiver’s moody, intense opening set and Hurley’s mild demeanour and soft acoustic guitar playing, quietness was indeed on offer.

In his polka-dotted hat and comfortable clothes, he told a story or two, like the one that prefaced The Rue Of Ruby Whores from 1999’s Weatherhole, about the first time he got invited to play a folk festival. Usually, he told us, he didn’t get asked because he was “too weird,” and then he spoke of Emmylou Harris, and how the festival’s mandate was to save a river – that was more like a creek, in his opinion – and about creatures called water dogs.

Most of Hurley’s songs could be considered deep cuts as he’s never really had a hit, but he chose even deeper cuts at the Tranzac. Several were about food – in addition to writing songs, Hurley loves to cook, paint and fix cars, among other things (read Snocko News for a fuller look into his life) – the highlight being Slurf Song from 1976’s Have Moicy, with its pretty gross chorus “We fill up our guts, then we turn it into shit, then we get rid of it”.

You could never describe him as a vocal powerhouse, and yet his voice held a gentle power. And like Fiver’s Simone Schmidt, he stared out at us with wide eyes as he played, never glancing at his fretboard. There was something so open and present about it, and the hushed room was reverently transfixed (though some singalongs happened toward the end).

Then without warning, Hurley set the humour aside and absolutely crushed us with exquisitely beautiful closing love song O My Stars, sung in duet on 1980’s Snockgrass but which was even more moving sung solo, as it took on a kind of lonely quality. It was filled to the brim with love and honestly made a person look forward to getting old after leading the richest, most non-conformist of lives.     

carlag@nowtoronto.com | @carlagillis

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