 Sonya Kitchell takes off the long cardigan that sticks to her black tube dress. "I'm not trying to be Sting," she jokes in her smooth-as-velvet manner. "He just got shaved onstage at Madison Square Garden. Did you guys hear about that?" The 19-year-old hippie with an old soul smiles half-apologetically to the audience, clearly engaged, and continues with her set.
Her set on this evening consisted largely of songs from her latest work, This Storm (Velour Recordings). The band members are completely in sync with each other - you can feel the energy and movement between the instruments as one entity - but it is Kitchell who owns the stage, clutching her guitar as if it is her beloved, emotions worn across her face without shame.
The young folk singer, a sort of new-age Joni Mitchell (and already in the same vein; she hit the road with the folk icon as well as Herbie Hancock last year), has a voice distinctly and unabashedly her own. You can feel Kitchell's emotional inspiration: Her eyes close on the more ethereal numbers, like "Robin in the Snow," and quickly spark up again in the rowdy "Fire," in which you can almost taste the anger in the air and start to wonder just who did this precocious teenager wrong.
A Sonya Kitchell show is a cross between being rocked to sleep on one's feet - in a good way, of course - and, like Kitchell herself, letting the music awaken the life inside of us as we groove to her easy beat. Says Kitchell, "I'm just rocking to a lullaby... It's nothing more / And nothing less / Than a search for something effortless."
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. Powered by AkoComment 2.0! |
