Brian Slattery Photos
Chloe.
Chloe, of the Hartford-based band Cvmrats, told stories about deceased friends and the difficulties of being mistaken for a train hopper, but everyone at Cafe Nine on Tuesday night knew the reason she — and all of them — were there. As the State Street club listed it, “on behalf of Chloe from Cvmrats, we are hosting a benefit show for her mom. All door proceeds are going to help support her current financial hardships and make a tough situation into hopefully something better.” As Chloe had posted on Instagram, the proceeds would “help my mom get back into stable housing” and “a better situation in general.”
Three other musical acts — Cafe Nine owner Paddy Meyer, David Taylor Coffey, and Bobby Dyckman — joined Chloe on the bill to rustle up a good-sized, enthusiastic crowd to raise some money. Along the way, each of the acts revealed that the motives for their altruism were coming from a sense of shared experience. It was a night of people helping someone who had fallen on hard times, because they had been there themselves.
Paddy Meyer kept the stage dark to perform two songs solo with acoustic guitar. The first, he said, was written with a friend; they’d both lived precarious lives in New York City and recorded several songs together during the pandemic shutdown in North Carolina. That song, “Labor Day,” was a heartfelt song about going through financial hardship that elicited sympathy by not asking for it. His second song, he said, was written from his past experience.
“When I was a younger person, I was a bad person,” he said, with honesty and self-deprecating humor; he’d ended up in trouble with the law. His mother picked him up from jail in tears, he said, and it was then he realized that “I got to think of something else to do.” So, he continued, “this song is about my love for my mother and my love for Roy Orbison.” Meyer played with casual precision. It came from the heart, directed toward a woman who didn’t give up on him.
The spotlights were turned on for David Taylor Coffey, who took the stage armed with an acoustic guitar and a ton of coiled energy, unleashing songs in a strong voice about romance and political struggle that balanced outrageous humor with disarming honesty and earnestness. “Holy fuck, you’re beautiful / like a burning limousine,” he sang in his first song, setting the tone for his set, which included titles like “All My Friends Are Anarchists.” A song about a tumultuous romance was followed by a nod to Tennessee Ernie Ford and his labor classic “16 Tons.”
Coffey engaged easily with the audience with an outpouring of energy (“give yourselves a hand for being here on a Tuesday night!”), but could also swing in the opposite direction, toward the cause at hand.
“Who wants a song that’s going to make you cry?” he asked.
“Make me cry!” someone in the audience yelled back. Coffey responded, like Meyer had, with a song about his mother, explaining how she had always anchored him. “No matter how dark it got,” he said, “my mom was there.” The song peeled back the layers of his own vulnerabilities, adding a new tenderness to the set when he returned to form. He ended his set with a song sung from the bar, microphones off, audience gathered around, as close as they could get.
“We’re here for a good cause and we have a great punk community here,” Bobby Dyckman of the New Haven-based Wolf Harbor said toward the beginning of his set, before launching into a set of taut originals. Dyckman’s fleet set was tight on banter and long on filling the club with music from his solo catalog, whether it was a song about having a bad time in Florida to a song about worrying that his apartment was haunted. All his material was marked by intricate guitar parts and a piercing vocal style that let every word be heard. Like Coffey had, he drew the audience closer to the stage, making them part of the energy of making music.
Toward the end of his set he too alluded to past struggles, with mental health and other issues, in an earlier part of his life. He announced that he “probably would have died” if he’d stayed in New York and New Jersey. Instead, he came here.
“New Haven saved my life,” he said. “I love this place, and I love this bar.”
Chloe herself finished up the evening with a set of mostly covers and a handful of originals, interspersed with banter about being in a band, about the vicissitudes of touring, and about the problems of trying to keep a guitar in tune. But any sense of hesitancy melted away as soon as she began playing and singing.
Accompanying herself with simple yet energetic rhythm parts, Chloe could let her voice dance, whether she curled it up into a croon or let it fly into a full-throated, warbling cry. Her originals stood up as strong as the songs she covered. In both cases, she gave them her own meaning — just as she thanked the audience for giving her mother a helping hand, and meant it.