This was published 8 years ago
Sydney Festival review: Michael Hurley and Meg Baird are two sides of folk
By Bernard Zuel
Michael Hurley and Meg Baird
St Stephen's Church, January 24
★★★½
Same same but different. In the most interesting ways.
Although both now live on the American west coast, having travelled from east coast childhoods, and have impressive guitar picking skills, Michael Hurley has been releasing music for 51 years, since becoming part of the wider New York folk scene in the first half of the 1960s, while Meg Baird was part of the psych-folk underground in Philadelphia at the turn of this century and has about a decade of solo work behind her.
Yet the age gap was the least of the differences on show in this pretty if sonically underwhelming church-cum-venue: a continent and even an ocean separate them.
Whereas Hurley, playing electric guitar and surprisingly chirpy (he had a reputation once as a man not fond of a mid-gig chat) draws strongly from American roots of country and blues, Baird, on acoustic and seemingly nervously shy, is most decidedly in the thrall of late '60s English folk. In a sense he was more grounded in the "present", while she skirted timeliness, though of course it wasn't quite as straightforward as that.
Hurley looked up from under his trucker's cap occasionally, telling us that in hotel rooms the "safest place" to sleep is in the corridors instead of the bed, before returning to stories of highways, dogs, bad choices and the benefits and perils of lust. Oh yes, and CB radios. When was the last time you heard that mentioned in a song?
Rather than the growl of the wizened bluesman or the whisky-soaked croak of the tired cowboy, Hurley still offers us his signature burst of falsetto, which throws a lighter, almost tender light on proceedings. It allows him to travel into the hinterland of darker fare but also means he can offer a country folk song that is so laid-back it probably couldn't be bothered moving to the back porch.
Baird's voice is high but not really flutey or flighty as so many in the nu-folk scene are, so we get delicacy but not fragility. Her version of Barbary Ellen, a standard which you would think had long ago lost its capacity to surprise, was captivating.
While she sounds as if she might retreat into songs the way she retreats between songs, in fact Baird is doggedly resolute and firm, like an American Beth Orton. Or, you might say, a distaff Michael Hurley.