You could lose your mind by fixating too much on which music becomes popular, which music doesn't and why. The most adjusted musicians and music fans eventually learn not to dwell on it. Nonetheless, some slights just eat at you, and in Milwaukee few acts have been more slighted than than Lady Cannon, the sometimes band/sometimes solo project of Martha Cannon, a singer-songwriter who reliably silences every room she plays. She’s an artist who should have bloggers in mid-sized cities she’s never even played before lighting up every time she posts a new demo, but instead she’s barely recognized in her own city, at least outside of the localized clusters of musicians and songwriters she typically shares shows with.
Monday night for a typically rapt crowd at Boone and Crockett, Cannon demonstrated once again why she’s one of the city’s most overlooked songwriters. She has the kind of felty, pretty voice that an artist with a perkier disposition could use to sell Hyundais and iPads, but her songs ache too deeply to succumb to preciousness. Like Leonard Cohen’s best, they’re plainspoken, somber and often mordantly witty. Both songwriters cling to the possibility of romance even as they question their capacity for it, and behind their somber disposition, both possess a vicious tongue. When Cannon pledges “I’m going to get you back” on “Get You Back,” a ripper from her 2012 album Whiskey Dear, it’s unclear whether she’s vowing to re-win a lover’s heart or promising to exact revenge, or whether she even distinguishes between the two. In her songs love is either an unattainable ideal or a form of intricate mutual destruction.
Some incarnations of her band have underscored those sentiments with volume, but her lean lineup Monday night left the emphasis where it belonged, on her wounded voice, lightly accompanying her with cello, upright bass and barely there drums. That less-is-more approach served the material beautifully, especially in the set’s final stretch, when Cannon took a shotgun to that famous Steve Martin quote about the impossibility of playing a sad song on a banjo.
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Openers Ladders established the mood for the night with a casually impressive set of tunes positioned somewhere between Laurel Canyon Americana and Pacific Northwest indie rock. The quartet released their debut album Suha just a few months ago, yet they devoted this show almost entirely to all-new material, revisiting just one song from their still-fresh full-length. Like the night’s headliner, they treated their set as if it were no big deal, with no expectation of fanfare even though they more than earned it.
