Seeing Lisa Miller play live has been a long-standing desire of mine - a several-year-long saga of good intentions and near misses and being almost excited/solvent enough to make it happen - so it was good to finally catch her last night at CERES park. I'd heard that she was puts on a really good show, and she didn't disappoint - her voice is just as wonderful in the live setting as on record, and the performance as a whole stood in pretty much the ideal relation to an artist's recorded material, in that the music and songs transferred seamlessly into the different medium while also taking on a more intimate, characterful nature. It's always good to get to a gig in which the artist's voice is so key and one is already very familiar with that voice from the albums, because every little idioyncrasy becomes somehow both familiar and new, especially when the singer is obviously a very natural, talented one (as is Miller).
It was quite a long set - getting towards an hour and a half, I think - and a nice setting in which to take it in, outdoors at the cafe with night falling and a gentle breeze after a mildly warm day. Miller seemed pretty relaxed, but she and her band (which included Shane O'Mara on guitar) were absolutely tight, and it was one of those cases where the music itself often sounded better in concert than on record (as opposed to merely the atmosphere being better and a slightly different perspective being brought on the songs - though both of those were going on, too), richer and warmer as well as more immediate. Setlist heavily weighted toward the last couple of albums - Car Tape and Version Originale - which meant that I didn't get to hear "Hang My Head", "Wipe The Floor", her takes on "You're A Big Girl Now" or "A Woman Left Lonely", or any of those other earlier faves. But she did play "Little Stars" (basically very similar to the VO recording, with maybe a bit more of a swing to it), which is the key one for me; also glad to hear "The Boy That Radiates That Charm" (probably my favourite Car Tape track), and her contribution to She Will Have Her Way, "I Hope I Never", was definitely one those 'better live than recorded' songs. All up, low-key though it was, this was probably one of my favourite shows in recent memory (say, one of the best four or five - including festival sets...obviously I've taken the time to think about this - of the last couple of years).
On stage before Miller was a local singer-songwriter named Emily Ulman, solo with guitar. She was in a similar vein to Miller - pretty voice with a catch and a fullness to it, rootsy pop-rock tunes in the classic style - and good.
