While others spent St. Patrick's Day in more boisterous celebration, The Coffee House offered a more serene, acoustic alternative by hosting folk singer-songwriters Hope Dunbar, Emily White and Katie Dahl. By sharing a stage for the evening, the three ladies presented differing, complementary approaches to the genre they share and a variety of personalities motivating their artistry.
The three friends, already chummy before embarking on a nine-date tour but becoming all the more going so many miles in a Prius, sat in a row on the half-century old venue's stage going from right to left to let every woman lead a song; the others occasionally lent harmonies. The artists' introductory remarks to each tune often affirmed folk's lyrically confessional nature over the past few decades while building a rapport whereby the audience could almost view them as friends by the end of the night as well.
Sitting on the left, Dahl has the home state distinction of being a Door County denizen. Vocally, her creamy alto should suit the taste of anyone already an aficionado of Mary Chapin Carpenter. She's the one of the trio who sang most of her local environs and family as well. A highlight among her contributions include a number inferring the superiority of independent eateries she once sang to a municipal committee to protest the potential opening of a Subway in her chain restaurant-free county. Elsewhere, she sang of in one tune of idiosyncratic, tomato farmer cousin and staunch Democrat mom and in another she paralleled being pregnant with son during Christmas with Mary carrying the Christ child during the same season.
Small town Nebraska pastor's wife and mother of three Hope Dunbar spoke more of her domesticity more between songs than sang of it. Though she stated that some of the value in her artistry is to chronicle lives of her family and friends, she is at least as apt at creating involving scenarios from whole, often imaginary cloth. She confessed that writing of heartbreak is easier for her than composing happy love songs, though she's happily wed. And she delivered the most uproarious ditty of the evening with "Jeneane," about a man who sought alternative means of providing his prospective mate a baby by nabbing one from a hospital's room of newborns.
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Seated in the middle and singing more impressionistically, and perhaps a bit more animatedly, than the women flanking her was Chicagoan Emily White. At least in her Coffee House performances this evening, her melodies tended toward melancholy and her lyrics not quite as obviously narrative as the artists sharing the stage with her. Though not overtly political as Ani DiFranco, at least in her repertoire here, White possesses a similar vocal tone and approachable earnestness. White’s flashes of self-effacing sense of humor, as when she copped to dressing for winter from October to May, also endeared her to the Coffee House throng. Perhaps tellingly, White was the singer for whom the other two co-headliners were most given to offering background vocals.
Likewise enchanting was the threesome's conclusion, a tightly harmonized take on Minneapolis/St. Paul folk chanteuse Brianna Lane's touching "Stones in the Water." It was a soaring, sorrowful way to wrap up a night of such musical bonhomie and made for a lovely showcase for voices that sound good together as the singers who possess them get on in each other's company.
