Tuesday, October 11, 2005
7:00 PM Prompt
6:30 Refreshments
Donation $12
I find it hard to believe, but this website says that the last time Annie Gallup played here was in March of 1999. There was a blizzard the night before. Annie drove down from Northampton for the show, but only a handful of people braved the roads (which were clear by then!) to hear her. Annie was the very first person to sing at Music By The Bay, back in 1996, with the setting sun directly in her eyes as she stood in front of the fireplace.
Annie Gallup's writing is unabashedly imaginative and richly sensual. She is a teller of short, elaborate tales - song-length works of fiction that sparkle with the complexity and polish of poetry; tightly packed lyrical strands that crackle with intelligence and spry wordplay, and pulse with insistent rhythm. Hold Annie's work up to that of many contemporary literary lions: she's the real thing. Annie is a gifted, inventive instrumentalist. Her guitar work is a fresh, welcome interplay of short lead runs and complex picking patterns. (As a teenager in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Annie learned to play listening to records by Doc Watson and blues great Mississippi John Hurt.)
Her latest CD arose from a song she had written, in which she had created some interesting fictional characters. Once the song was done, she found herself wondering about the characters' lives, so she wrote a whole album's worth of songs about them. She follows them over a substantial period of time, in different locations, narrated from different points of view.