music
A week before his solo set at the Gravity Lounge, Danny Schmidt sat next to Paul Curreri on a sofa onstage while Jan Smith performed his song "Dark-Eyed Prince" as part of the annual King of My Living Room concert. Smith gave Schmidt’s song the slow, measured tempo it keeps on record, her voice wrapping around Schmidt’s original melody like a lampshade, softening his high-end shine and, like any living room, tempering the light that serves as any room’s pulse.
 Dark-eyed prince: Former local folker Danny Schmidt’s set at Gravity Lounge was fit for a king. |
| Take a listen to "Beggars and Mules" by Danny Schmidt:
|
But the beauty of Danny Schmidt’s live shows is that of a bulb uncovered and electrified, the filament inside giving off the same unearthly glow that Schmidt himself possesses. That light can fluctuate with a surge in current just as Schmidt’s songs can shine a bit brighter when he slips out of rigid tempo to let his inner metronome run the show.
Richmond native Louis Ledford took the Gravity Lounge stage a bit after 7pm on December 6—a David Cross look-alike in red flannel and jeans—and ran a few dry introductory comments by the audience, cutting each one off with "I’m just kidding." Just before he started, Ledford leaned into the microphone for one last joke. "Not to wear my life on my sleeve, but I’m out of practice." Beat. "I’m not kidding."
Ledford is a deceptively smooth guitarist, using only thumb and index finger on the strings of his Guild acoustic but earning honeyed polyrhythms from the instrument. He pulls off of his vocals at the last minute in choruses, leaning into a harmonica to breathe simple riffs into the teeth of the metal, and rides sleek, one-string transitions between chords, his fingers sliding up frets like empty freight cars on railroad tracks.
The crowd of 50 or so that watches Ledford grows as the time for Schmidt’s set nears, and is filled with members of the King of My Living Room crew. Devon Sproule sits near the front in a white cable-knit sweater and Brady Earnhart sits with a cup of tea in a black leather jacket and his customary cap when the lanky, bright-eyed Schmidt steps onstage, wraps his long body around his worn acoustic and begins.
The show is long, split into two sets, with the first half loaded with songs that gently devastate and cradle in equal measure. Schmidt opens with "Dark-Eyed Prince," and this writer shudders in time at the description of a prince that would "venture out at night, bejeweled and erudite." The bass notes in "Leaves are Burning," the lead track from Schmidt’s Little Grey Sheep, pop in octaves, low-high-low-high, as their master inverts his careful lyrical formulas. A description of fighting cancer in the song "This Too Shall Pass"—"We kill it like a buffalo/ With awe and with respect"—comes in a moment of silence, and then Schmidt regroups his herd of words and music and carries on.
| Take a listen to "Drawing Board" by Danny Schmidt:
|
Schmidt leans towards newer material towards the end of his first set and the beginning of his second, playing a few unrecorded songs and the excellent "Drawing Board" with Joia Wood recreating her backing vocals in a tone that hugs Schmidt’s thin voice like his thin arms hug his beaten guitar. He takes a turn for story-songs as the evening gets darker, the big house blues of "Two-Timing Bank Robber’s Lament" and the crippling words and held breaths of "Stained Glass."
The time nears 11pm and I can hear Devon Sproule singing along with Schmidt from behind me, something about the night belonging to our souls and our songs, and I wonder how, when the night gets dark so early, someone can stay so bright for so long?
