Antje Duvekot + The Brilliant Inventions - Club Passim (Cambridge, MA; Apr. 5, 2008)

It’s difficult to write about someone as brazenly genuine as Antje Duvekot. This is no art-for-the-sake-of-art venue for pretension. I find it near impossible to maintain any kind of objective distance from such a raw bundle of twisty feelings and highly personal stories. So let’s not try, yeah?

Here’s how it is: having taken a break from folk the last few years, I shuffled into Club Passim last night with more than a little hesitation. But Antje’s open face and childlike tone melted my skepticism immediately. A couple of bars in, I was huddled with my neighbors, face upturned and eyes open wide, drinking in her stories with abandon.

She played “Long Way” early on—this is the song you are most likely to have heard before, and the one that I knew, going in, that I would love. To anyone who has traveled cross-country, it captures everything you wanted to express and couldn’t: it’s a catharsis of things seen and understood. Antje performed this song with more patience and solemnity than you will find in its recording, and I was thankful—anything to make it last just a little longer. I reveled in the seamless exchange among harmonica, vocals, and guitar—the steady beat from the slap, slap of her doc martens. In this song, I think I got to see something pretty important.

Antje’s linguistic command layered over everyday stories presents us something we know. We recognized the cautious warning in “South”: “Mother, mother take good care / Cause there are dagger shards of glass out there / The ones who wear the shoes don’t seem to give a damn / It’s hard to find a place to stand.” And from “Anna”—an account of faded recollections: “And Anna / Introduces herself again / A man picks up her hand / And says, “Anna, look, the spring has come” / And your carousel is waiting"—we realized an old ache that we are probably not able to talk about.

Toward the end, Antje covered Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat.” Things had been going so well, and then . . . I admit it, I cringed at first. It’s a brilliant song, but it’s been done and done . . . and done. Right? But this was not the same thing. Imagine the saddest story you’ve ever heard, but it’s being sung by a child. The sweetness, the ill-advised optimism—maybe even willed innocence—made this a more heartbreaking rendition than I have heard.

Antje’s music is brave: she shares her history—her visions—without qualification. She talks about important things, and you know that she’s smart. She takes her time, without apology, and the simultaneous lightness and stillness in her voice exudes the confidence that I suspect is a major contributor to her success thus far.

The opening act, an Atlanta based duo called The Brilliant Inventions who go way back with Antje, were damn adorable, really. They were earnest through and through, sharing raw but bright-eyed accounts of heartbreak and recovery, peppered with between-the-music stories about Buddhist retreats and ex-girlfriends (ohhh, folk shows). Their sound was rich, their vocals nearly flawless, though decidedly pop-infused, and sufficiently rough around the edges to keep them a hair outside the realm of guilty pleasure. These tight harmonies and boyish autobiographies in a place like Club Passim, with its questionable lighting and music-stand-cluttered stage, at times brought to mind what it might have been like to catch Simon & Garfunkel when they had just stepped out. The Brilliant Inventions say they’d like to return to Boston; we’d like that, too. 

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