Photo credit: Lindsey Barnes
For his last album, 2016’s Visions of Us on the Land, Damien Jurado toured with a six-piece psych rock band, playing long, loud sets each night. A lot of people weren’t into it, Jurado admitted to the crowd at his show Sunday night at the Back Room at Colectivo. This concert looked a lot more like what listeners probably expect from the singer-songwriter: just Jurado, seated on a folding chair with an acoustic guitar, playing with occasional contributions from a second acoustic guitarist and a backup vocalist who colored some of his songs with just the faintest traces of harmonies.
Jurado mostly stuck to material from his sensational new album, The Horizon Just Laughed, one of his most straightforward in years and a master class in economical songwriting. Even more so than usual, these songs are packed to the brim with characters, memories, emotions, geographical details and existential revelations. “What good is living if you can’t write your ending?” he sang on gorgeous “The Last Great Washington State,” raising his usually hushed voice as the song built to a knockout finale. It’s one of his finest yet—which is saying something, since over the last two decades he’s written plenty of fine ones—and for many in the crowd, it was the first chance to hear it. Breaking from industry norms, Jurado announced that he wouldn’t post the new album to digital platforms until this summer, months after its physical release.
His performances were as potent as you’d expect, yet the show itself was sometimes pokey,marked by endless guitar-tuning breaks (he blamed the weather for throwing his guitar out of whack) and meandering stories he sometimes seemed to be telling out of obligation. If his heart sometimes didn’t seem to be completely in the show, there may be something to that. During some banter toward the end of the night, he swatted away a couple of song requests but happily answered questions from the crowd. When one fan asked which he prefers more, the heavy psychedelic rock of his previous tours or the acoustic setup of this one, he didn’t pause. He much prefers doing the loud stuff.
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There are some acoustic acts who only listen to acoustic music, he explained during his illuminating rant, but he’s not one of them. Contrary to what listeners might expect, he insisted that he doesn’t own so much as a single album by Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake or Elliott Smith. And while he puts plenty of himself in his songs, he said he primarily thinks of himself as a medium who channels the voice of others (he likened himself to Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost). There’s a power in this style of performance, he acknowledged. It’s just not his first love.
