Brian Slattery Photos
Allison Farrell.
Allison Farrell was greeted with cheers and cries of “more” before she even began performing. She was gracious as she took her place at the front of the room at Best Video in Hamden on Thursday night, but her wry wit wasn’t far behind.
“Thank you for coming,” she said. “I almost didn’t.”
Farrell has been performing steadily in the New Haven area for years and garnered notice all along the way, recognized at one time or another by the New Haven Advocate (R.I.P.) as best singer/songwriter, best vocalist, and member of the city’s best vocal group. Yet on stage Farrell, now in her 60s, was self-deprecating. “I don’t have the same voice I used to have,” she said, “but I’m doing the best with what I’ve got.”
The caveat wasn’t necessary. Beginning her show with an a cappella rendition of a Cole Porter song, Farrell used an easy vibrato and a sparkling performance to land every single one of the song’s many jokes. It was a good warm-up for the main event. Picking up an electric guitar, Farrell introduced the next song by saying that “this is a song I started working on in the ‘90s. It just takes me a while.” The audience laughed, but then she imparted some wisdom. The lyrics had been done for a long time, but she couldn’t play a guitar part she liked for the song. Over time, that changed.
“Now I can play it the way I want,” she said.
It was a lighthearted song about dealing with back problems, which Farrell delivered in a way that drew just enough attention to the cleverness of the lyrics (“I tell them I’m feeling great / I just like to supinate / But truthfully I’m lying all the time”). What could have been missed because it seemed so natural was the high quality of her guitar playing. Farrell is no simple strummer. As she sang, delivering her knotty lyrics, she also played accompaniment and took solos, ranging across the fretboard and holding down harmonies, countermelodies, and rhythm.
“I either write funny songs or incredibly difficult songs,” she said, referring to the seriousness of some of the topics she took on. “It’s sort of emotional whiplash. So I hope you all have chiropractors.”
The audience laughed, but it was also a fair warning. Her next song, dedicated to her wife, was disarmingly beautiful. The next song, which she referred to as a “revenge song,” balanced humor and bile. Breaking out a cover of an Adele song, she asked anyone in the audience who knew the harmony to back her up, and they did.
In her second set, the emotional roller coaster Farrell warned us about got a little more intense. She started off light with a song inspired by the time she cried upon receiving a Barbie as a present as a child (“I feel badly about it now,” she deadpanned, to laughter), but then dove into a seething song reflecting the current political situation.
“Stand by me, I will fight for you,” she sang. “Will you fight for me?”
It got heavier from there, as she then delivered a song about a man reeling from the news that his partner has been sexually assaulted. Then she headed into the excoriating “White People are Clueless,” which featured both her most savage lyrics and her most wrenching guitar playing, as she used a loop pedal to add layer upon cacophonous layer.
“The older I get,” she said, “the more I realize how unfair things are.”
She ended her second set with another very funny rewriting of a classic — this one a version of “Don’t Fence Me In” written from the point of view of the McCaughey septuplets while they were still in the womb — and a swinging cover of Lucinda Williams.
Amid the intense applause that followed, there was another cry for “more!” just like there had been at the beginning of the show. But Farrell was done. “That’s all the songs I know,” she joked. But she was serious, too.