The Terri Clark concert was like watching a reality TV show happen before your eyes, with a sad lack of cameras there to record it.
This was a different kind of show. Whether you like country or not, whether you go to a lot of concerts or very few, this one was rare. One star performer all alone with just a bouquet of guitars and a trove of stories is hardly ever done. It's not unheard of for Juno-winners with multiple hits to do a solo show, but it isn't often, and what Clark did was truly another level. She spent half the night talking. It was conversation, jokes, spontaneous interaction with the audience, and a question-answer session as one of the encores.
If it wasn't enough to hear her disclose deeply personal feelings - some warmly wrapped in humour and some nearly (actually, not nearly, it happened) inducing tears - she also disclosed talents like we've never seen before. She was fearlessly vulnerable about talking about the disintegration of her first marriage or the passing of her beloved mother from cancer. She brought some of it up herself and she followed the audience's lead on other topics. It was a wide-ranging, emotional conversation with a soundtrack.
There is a musical vulnerability, too, to going out on the road all by yourself. There are no backup singers to puff up the vocal projections, no mercenary musicians to do the heavy instrumental lifting. She had to do it all herself.
She may as well have lit a campfire for how intimate the sound was. She didn't hit the right vocal pitch at times. Her guitar playing was a bit boring sometimes. The flipside of that, though, was also splendidly revealing. I've been to a fair few Terri Clark concerts and she's a bona fide international star of the genre - one of only two Canadians in the Grand Ole Opry (the other, the iconic Hank Snow). Yet I had no idea that she was that good on the guitar. Not just good: freakin' amazing.
She also gives hope to aspiring singers. You don't need to be operatically schooled or have the wind capacity of the Bluenose in order to nail a vocal performance. There are those who can belt it out so powerfully it shakes the dust out of the attic (think kd lang, Martina McBride, Carrie Underwood), but you can also do it the smooth way that puts its arm around you and leads you off into a good lyrical story (think Dean Brody, Anne Murray, Bonnie Raitt). You have to have strong material and a trained voice, is all. Clark proves this out song after song.
And I had no idea she had that many gears in her material range. Yes, she leans refreshingly well on the golden-age country sound, but she could make a whole other career out of acoustic blues-country. When she cracked off Gypsy Boots - just her, her whisky voice and a growly metal resophonic guitar - it sounded infinitely better than the studio version, and opened up a box of Terri Clark crayons that we'd never coloured with before.
This is probably going to become a trend. As the download theft era encroaches on songwriting royalties, artists will be out on the road like never seen since the days of thinking and television being exclusively black-and-white. Now, in order to get a strong commercial income, musicians will have to turn to the live audience.
Most musicians can't do what Terri Clark can do, though. She is an effortless comedian, an honest conversationist, someone comfortable in her own skin, and comes packing a hit-list too big for any one concert to handle. She has the musical goods and she has the master of ceremonies goods. Each show is guaranteed to be different that all the others, and the relationship between artist and audience is guaranteed to be stronger at each farewell.
It's just too bad that some network doesn't roll credits each time she's shaking hands and waving goodbye to her fans.
