sara-watkinspm Sara Watkins in Whelan’s on February 2nd 2013

All tabled and chaired, the main venue at Whelan’s is set up to be a pleasant refuge from the anarchy of a Saturday night on Camden Street, especially considering the main attraction tonight is South California’s Sara Watkins. Having last appeared in Dublin with The Decemberists in 2011 she’s here to tour her latest album ‘Sun Midnight Sun.’

Support comes from Allie Bradley, a native of Derry, that hotbed of talent. She plays an acoustic guitar and sings her own songs with a very soulful voice. Her song Simplest Of Freedoms is a great showcase for that voice and she sings with great belief and gravitas, a fine opener to proceedings.

An unpretentious crowd has gathered, seemingly unmoved by past endeavours or reputation. Sara notices this herself, saying “this feels like a house gathering” and it does. The border between audience and artist is broken down here, everyone’s in it together for the sole purpose of enjoying themselves. The sound she expresses herself through is the same sound that travelled and evolved through migratory ships and New World arrivals to sawdust-covered and beer-soaked hardwood floors. The ghosts of these histories seem to hang over the place.

And what a sound it is that she makes. The arrangement of acoustic guitar and electric bass while Sara plays fiddle simply could not be improved upon. When they play an old southern rag it is not far removed from the instrumental jams that have been enlivening pub scenes across this country for hundreds of years, to the point that many in the crowd can’t resist a foot-stomp. She also sings with a wonderfully sweet voice, that she somehow manages to take higher and higher and with great bursts of energy, a thing well demonstrated on her own catchy song When It Pleases You.

When the accompaniment recedes and Sara steps away from the microphone to the front of the stage she pretty much certifies the gig as an all-inclusive event. She sits on one of the amps and dangles her bow on the end of her fingers as she conducts the audience in the refrain to Long Hot Summer Day, which she then begins to sing and play herself, the gathered crowd in silence and anticipation for their cue to come in. By the end of the evening they have whistled, clapped, sung and stomped their way through the show, a unified orchestra under the tutelage of the stage-bound American.

Not to be limited by talent only in realms of singing, fiddle-playing and showmanship, she then takes up the ukulele and sings Where Will You Be, before being rejoined by her flawless guitarist and bass-player. They do a number of covers, from Take It With Me by Tom Waits to the written-by-Mike-Nesmith-but-made-famous-by-Linda-Ronstadt Different Drum, and for the final encore they play Broke-down Palace by the Grateful Dead. She takes these songs and represents them in her own style, filling them with a kind of liveliness and warmth that makes it a great pity when it all comes to an end.