Laura Cantrell

I went out to see Laura Cantrell play at the Liverpool academy last Thursday. Laura is a new country singer who actually lives in New York. Her first album was "not the trembling kind" that was new country sung with old country heart. I played that CD a lot. It was a big favourite CD of John Peel. She has a fantastic sweet and sad voice. The audience was mostly star struck blokes. There was a very strange sing a long part to a song that goes like "the whisky makes you sweeter". I was at the bar getting a round at the time. I managed to restraing myself from buying two shots of whisky, mostly because spending ten quid on a round for two people seemed a bit excesive, even for someone with my hedonistic tastes. The singers in the audience belted out the song with a kind of embarrased enthusiam that made the experience somewhat wierd. Laura did "Lee Harvey Oswald was a friend of mine" because some heckler had requested it at an earlier show. Wow hecklers are a force for good. I liked the mandolin playing. This is some kind of neat picking thing. I am not very good with this musianship thing, so perhaps it was something else. I need the third Cantrell CD for some serious lonesome time. Support was by Holly Williams who was a neat singersong writer. I got her CD. The sad thing is, I will never brush her blond hair, because she ended her set with a cover of a Hank Williams song. That is thing I remember about her set. There is no escape from granddady, but a song is a song and these thingts have lives of their own. I have played here CD a lot, so perhaps a happy ending after all.