Love Lucy

                                               Lucy Wainwright Roche best said it at the end of her opening performance for Over The Rhine at the Warehouse Live Studio in Houston last night: "You didn't come to see me, which is always awkward."

Very true. I didn't know who she was and didn't expect much of this young female singer in a green hoodie.   She stumbled on stage clutching an accoustic guitar, explained that her luggage had been lost between airports, and that she was tired and frazzled.  She didn't seem to remember all her lines at first.

Then I listened.  To the story of her long trip from California, the road life, the aborted London date with a fellow musician, the false rumors of having written a hate song about her sister and what it is like to be a high-school band member.  She was funny and kind and engaging.

In between the stories I listened to songs that caught me off guard with their well crafted poetry.

"We come to you on our knee", Wainwright Roche sang about the London emergency room where she'd ended up with a very ill date on that fateful Saturday night.  The song was the opposite of the funny story she'd just told of going out for pizza with a guy she hardly knew, only to have to call his parents later, and inform them of their son's serious condition.  In her song, the depiction of the emergency room and its unwilling guests was as fragile as a glass vial of injectable antibiotics.  It carried the same hopeful promise of healing tempered by the uncertainty of life.  I found myself singing along to words I thought I had never heard but must have carried inside me since my first scary trip to the emergency room some twenty years ago.

Lucy Wainwright Roche is not a singer but a magician.  She reels you in with a laugh and spins you blindfolded around the room.  You think she's singing a lullaby but when you finally opens your eyes, you're seventeen again.  She's deposited you on the football field, the lights are shining in your eyes, your parents are fighting for their middle age lives and you must pick up your snaredrum and march with the band.  You do.

And when the song stops, you look up to Lucy Wainwright Roche and ask: more.  Please more!