The Personal Is Political

Once again, I found myself at The Burdock for an early show after stuffing myself with a veggie roti at Vena's. I had been anticipating Wednesday's show because Taryn Kawaja was playing. I first knew of her when she joined Ben Caplan's band and had a major impact. I kept missing her rare solo sets, usually played before a Caplan set. But after all this time, she was finally showcasing some new solo material.

Kawaja's short opening set with just an electric bass and her on piano was a revelation. The new songs (Hum, Choreographers, Pilot Man, Again We Are Strangers) were snapshots of a relationship slowly falling apart. It was partly the fault of the woman, at least in her view. But it seemed mostly the man's: taking things for granted, engaging in destructive habits. Kawaja played with the pop structure: changing the length of verses, using near or internal rhymes. Combined that craft with a raw emotionality to her singing, it was a wonderful set.

I highlight Kawaja's skill because head-liner Gabrielle Papillon wasn't quite at that level. I'm mostly over love songs (with rare exceptions like the previous set), so I appreciated Papillon tackling other topics such as social anxiety (I Don't Want To Go To Sleep), Me Too movement (Shout It Out), and being true to yourself (New Age Faces). But her metronomic approach of regular meter and on-the-nose rhymes made them sounded generic. I kept imagining them used as background music to fan-edit tributes of popular TV shows uploaded to Youtube. She could write a catchy chorus though.

This was the second recent show where socially relevant topics failed to engage me because songwriters often treat them as speechifying. This Do-You-Hear-The-People-Sing rallying cry approach could sometimes work. But I think Suzanne Vega's Luka is a better model: using a personal story (even if fictional) to illuminate a larger concern.