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Carrie Newcomer blends country, folk styles
May 31st, 2007
by Bob Karlovits - Tribune-Review Music Writer
Carrie Newcomer has discovered a bit of wisdom about music that applies to virtually everything.
"There is nothing more powerful than a true statement," she says.
It's a truth that can be connected easily to the work of the singer who opens this year's First Fridays at the Frick program, which has become an annual treat of the summer.
Newcomer blends folk and country styles into a sound distinctly her own, dealing with issues as universal as love, as specific as the need for a living wage, and as passionate as betrayal and understanding.
It is all part of a life outlook that shapes the direction of her music.
"The most powerful songs come from who I am," says Newcomer, who performed at the Frick in August 1998.
That sense of identity also can come from the people who seem to haunt her.
Newcomer first encountered them when she put together a recording called "Betty's Diner: The Best of Carrie Newcomer." The songs were about the imagined inhabitants of an imagined diner -- a gay priest, an aging couple, a shopworn angel and others.
When it came time to work on another album, she found herself going back to the diner for "Regulars and Refugees."
"The diner folk weren't finished with me yet," she says with a mild laugh. "My husband said that they were living with us so much they were going to have to start paying rent."
Part of their lives came from Newcomer's other interests in writing -- poetry, short stories and novels. Newcomer liked the idea of using the characters from the diner to tell musical stories.
She sees a power in songs telling stories with "richness, conciseness and clarity."
The diner crew also gave her "the closest opportunity I ever had to work with something like the characters in a novel," she says.
Telling a story through characters also allows a songwriter to reach listeners in a more direct fashion, Newcomer says. It is possible to write an "anthem" that proclaims the injustice of war, she says, but it is easier to touch people with a song about a person who had suffered because of that.
Newcomer, who will only admit she is in her late 40s, says she is not a political songwriter, but is an "activist" who writes about the "human condition."
She has donated portions of album sales and done benefit concerts for groups such as Planned Parenthood of America, The Nature Conservancy, Habitat for Humanity and the American Friends Service Committee.
Newcomer is an Indiana native and resident, who lives outside Bloomington. She jokes about going to a variety of schools there before finishing with a degree in visual arts from Purdue University.
At the show here, she will be joined by pianist Gary Walters performing music from the diner, as well as songs she plans to take into a recording studio in June.
Newcomer says she has grown enthusiastic about working in the duo setting. It trims away all the musical elements and shines what she calls a "spotlight" in one direction.
"With a duo, it's all about the song," she says.
Bob Karlovits can be reached at bkarlovits@tribweb.com or (412) 320 7852.