WHAT’S ALWAYS DISTINGUISHED FOLK MUSIC is the sublime space created between artist and audience. Perhaps it’s the confessional nature of the music, performedin a small venue, that creates the unique musical vibe.
Few folk artists are as masterful as Nerissa and Katryna Nields in achieving that magical connection with an audience. Last Friday at the Me&Thee Coffeehouse — in the Unitarian Universalist Church in Marblehead — a packed crowd was treated to sisters Katryna and Nerissa’s wonderful mix of heartfelt folk and pop songs andoffbeat banter and storytelling.
Katryna’s country-inflected soprano vocals shimmered, telling stories of love, heartbreak and finding spiritual solace. One could feel the audience’s pure adulation of the artists, and the reflected glow the sisters directed back to the fans.
When it comes to church coffeehouses, it’s this intimate quality of the Me&Thee that’s helped to earn the club’s reputation as among the premier folk venues in New England, able to draw first-rank artists from Pete Seeger and Suzanne Vega to Shawn Colvin.
The Nields sisters play an amalgam of country, pop and folk music, marked by their lush harmonies and Katryna’s beautiful Patsy Cline-inflected vocals. The two are veterans of the New England music scene, having previously fronted The Nields — the alt-folk quartet formed by Katryna and Nerissa and their respective husbands, bassist Dave Chalfant and guitarist David Nields (he took Nerissa’s name when they married).
In 1998, the sisters were approached by the Lilith Fair producers about performing as a duo; the band subsequently dissolved and the sisters went on to successfully launch a career on the New England coffeehouse circuit. The show featured many songs from the duo’s latest album “Love and China” (ZOE/Rounder) — a mix of witty pop songs, folk-rock tunes and plaintive ballads about love lost. Indeed, many of the songs were written by Nerissa while her marriage to former Nields bandmate David Nields was breaking up.
Take “He Loves the Road,” a high-lonesome ballad about a forlorn lover. “How can you hate the prairie?/How can you hate the sea/How can you hate the sound of the high lonesome/For he loves the road more than me.” Another highlight was “The Sweetness,” where Katryna radiantly sang a bittersweet tale of wasted love.
This amounted to an evening of interesting contrasts: sad ballads about love-gone-wrong, punctuated by the sisters’ rollicking stream of quirky anecdotes, storytelling and ribbing each other — as perhaps only siblings can do.
It’s been said that artists are drawn to the Me&Thee thanks to the club’s mix of such freeform ambience and stature as a first-rate folk listening room. “An evening at the Me&Thee feels more like a long conversation than a concert,” Boston Globe folk critic Scott Alarik once wrote. The Nields sisters’ onstage banter and extended exchanges with the audiences showed that the Me&Thee still captivates artists and audiences alike.
Perhaps the one questionable aspect of the show was the duo’s performance of a handful of children’s songs — with puppets and all — inspired by Katryna’s 1-1/2-year-old daughter. The songs felt somewhat out of place and interrupted the graceful flow of the music.
Otherwise, the Me&Thee performance nicely showcased the sisters’ diverse musical range. On “Kiss Me on the Moon,” Katryna played a beautiful solo piano piece; “Tailspin,” a full-tilt rocker, showed the duo can still pack the punch with melodic guitar-driven pop songs. “This Happens Again and Again,” saw the sisters leave the stage, performing the enchanting, madrigal-like piece without microphones amid the first row of the audience.
This review first appeared in The Marblehead Reporter on Thursday, October 31, 2002. © 2002 Townonline.com and Herald Interactive Advertising Systems, Inc.