Songwriters in the Round featuring Tom Catmull, Caroline Keys and Larry Hirshberg at Live from the Divide on Friday, March 25th at 8pm (doors at 7pm)
Tom Catmull is a songwriter(transplanted Texan) based out of Missoula, MT. He likes very much what he does. This includes telling stories, making acoustic and electric guitar sounds and then using them to wrap words around a melody. He also likes singing quite a bit. Most of the songs he sings are technically his, but they all pull/borrow/steal shamelessly from the traditions of country, blues, folk and pop music.
It’s so much fun that you can find the Sussex School music teacher in more bands than you can keep track of: The Shiveries, a chamber-folk group; Glass Spiders, a David Bowie tribute band; Joey Running Crane and the Dirty Birds, a punk-informed country act; The Best Westerns, a shambling country-rock group.
Not that she doesn’t write – she publishes poetry and pens her own songs.
Part of what makes Hirshberg interesting is that he never seems to be trying to make the listener feel something. He takes a simple idea, sometimes a trivial one, and expands on it until something magical happens. In “Put the Kettle On” he lists all the reasons for putting a kettle on the stove including, “You’re alone at home and the house is old, put the kettle on.” But then as the song progresses it becomes stranger. Suddenly you’ve got lines like “Residue of a dream, it makes you cold, put the kettle on,” and “In the dark you think you need air. Light a fire underneath your stairs.” What are we talking about now? There’s never a menacing tone to Hirshberg’s songs, but stray ideas creep in that start to push them into wonderfully uncertain territory.
