Brian Slattery Photo
Natalie Tuttle at Cafe Nine Wednesday night.
Opener Kyla P. stood on the stage of Cafe Nine tuning her guitar as Natalie Tuttle (pictured) moved behind her with a djembe and cajon, ready to back her up.
“The first time I ever met Natalie was the first time I ever sang in public,” Kyla P. said. She related how she and Tuttle hit it off fast. Tuttle liked the look of her guitar and asked Kyla P. if she could try it out. Kyla P. let her. When Tuttle started to play, Kyla P. recalled what she thought: Holy shit, you’re good.
Natalie Tuttle was the headliner on a three singer-songwriter bill at Cafe Nine Wednesday night. She has been steadily making a name for herself in New Haven, well beyond the musicians who have known about her since she was a teenager playing at the Space. She has developed an audience healthy enough to make Cafe Nine proud on a Wednesday night, and if there was any doubt what the people in the club had come to hear, it was quickly dispelled by the near-complete silence that took over the place when Tuttle played a couple of the songs off her July 2015 EP Unwind. Particularly on “Unwind” and “Irony,” the crowd wanted to hear every note, every tap, every ringing harmonic.
Tuttle didn’t disappoint. In the intervening months since Unwind’s release, the songs from the album have become looser, more lived in. They swung and swerved a little more as Tuttle stretched out on them, adding a beat here and there when she felt like it, letting some of the vocal lines fall farther back on the count. An older song, “Rose-Colored Glasses,” was given new life in Tuttle’s ever more able hands. Meanwhile, Tuttle also started breaking in new material, giving the audience a sense of where she’s headed.
In every song, what shone through was Tuttle’s singular ability to convey the sound of an entire ensemble with just her voice and her hands, working the strings and body of her guitar. This sound, spacious and resonant, started the second she hit the first chord. It filled the room halfway through her set when she took a simple, emotionally direct line — “But I would love myself / If you would love me so” — and turned it into a plea that deepened with each repetition, as Tuttle unfurled an endlessly changing texture on the guitar that made it seem as if the ground were shifting beneath our feet.
It didn’t end until she’d wrapped up a delightful take on the Eagles’ “Take It Easy.” She delivered it as she did her own material, with disarmingly straightforward honesty. Toward the end of the song, though, she let a little chuckle through, and everyone laughed with her.
Kristen Ford.
If Tuttle showed how to do a lot with a little, Kristen Ford, the act who preceded her, showed how to do a lot with a lot. Originally from Boston but now essentially living in a perpetual state of tour, Ford used two guitars, a kick drum, a hi-hat, her own sharp-edged voice, and a rack of effects pedals — including, crucially, a loop pedal — to create songs that started off surging and built to peak after emotional peak, interspersed with hilarious banter. As each song progressed and Ford’s songs got more and more intricate, it was almost as if she were in a contest to one-up herself. Her second-to-last song was a poppy number, the lyrics to which were a simple, contagiously sing-along phrase: Donald Trump is a huge fucking asshole. The audience learned the song fast; within a few seconds, Ford only had to say “Donald Trump is … ” and the crowd filled in the rest.
“It’s better now, isn’t it?” Ford said at the song’s end, just after the laughter had died down.
“Temporarily,” someone from the audience shouted back.
Ford easily topped that, however. Her last and most energetic song of the evening found her layering guitar and guitar over voice and voice, driven by her propulsive drumming, until it all gave away to a startling, heavy conclusion that brought the house down.
“Yeah!” the man behind me shouted again and again, slowing down with her as she brought the song to a shuddering close. “Yeah! Yeah!” That, and the wall of cheers that greeted Ford when she finished, were the only real responses possible.