The security of a hometown show, even a place where you haven’t lived since your teens, is a downright winsome thing. Even if you’re not a fan of such comeliness, it’s there if you—the listener—and the artist need it.
I’m not sure Gail Ann Dorsey, a bassist/vocalist with brand-name affiliations such as David Bowie, the National, Gang Of Four and Tears For Fears, needed the security of having hailed from West Philly to make her feel at one with the audience at City Winery. Most of the sold-tight room’s crowd was a mix of old-head Bowie fans (including a few Sigma Kids), newer-head Bowie fans and those devotees of the Patreon-driven singer/songwriter scene that birthed Dorsey’s recent take on solo music-making. Plus, there was a handful of old neighborhood friends and family members who sighed and cried when Dorsey mentioned her mother, the doyenne of her block, Ruby.
Not that Dorsey is actually new to solo music-making: She lived in London throughout the ’80s, was signed to Sire, made a new-wave-y R&B first album in 1988 (The Corporate World) and a second LP in 1992 on Island (Rude Blue). After that, she joined up with Tears For Fears until she got plucked by Bowie in 1995 for a tour that lasted until he left the stage in 2004, plus four albums, including his penultimate recording, 2013’s The Next Day. So, the Bowie thing has stuck to her like sand to glue (she closed her City Winery set with a crowd sing-along to “Space Oddity”), even though one of her most impactful songs performed this evening, the “Fast Car”-like “Pulling A Cloud,” was written by Fears mainman Roland Orzabal.
It was apparent, too, that, for the most part, Dorsey wasn’t altogether so interested in the usual trappings of the acoustic singer/songwriter—until she was, covering Neil Young’s “Days That Used To Be” and Bread’s “The Guitar Man” (done as “The Guitar Woman”).
Starting the evening in an eerily ethereal mood with Frippertronic guitar layers learned from Bowie bandmate Gerry Leonard, Dorsey showed off a clarion-clear voice and its swirling soul on everything thing from a doomily epochal version of Cass Elliot’s “New World Coming” to her own drum-machine-driven “This Time (Barely Alive).” That last tune, with its gorgeously ascending bridge topped by a neo-falsetto that cut like a knife through the autumnal melody, came from the same place her next nakedly romantic song (“Nether Land”) did: her 2004 album, I Used To Be. Both were solidly dreamy musical moments that made you think, “Hey, she should’ve moved away from Bowie and Tears For Fears sooner.”
That’s her plan for the immediate future Dorsey told the crowd, before plunging into a rustic version of “The Corporate World” (she called its take on “capitalism on steroids” a prescient vision), a new song (whose title I missed that had a kumbaya-like vibe and a few Pete Townshend chord twists) and “Buzzin’”
“I don’t write a lot of love songs because I have a disastrous love life,” Dorsey said by way of introduction to “Buzzin’” and its lucid, chamber-pop feel, sans the ornate strings.
Anyone who has heard Dorsey play through Bowie’s exquisite-corpse-like existentialism and Tears For Fears’ opulent pop could fill in the dots she sketched at City Winery, especially as she closed her pre-“Space Oddity” crowd-pleasing moment with her own moodily atmospheric, loss-driven songs: “Maybelline” (not that one) and “Philadelphia” (no, not that one, either). Though Dorsey had a few cornily sentimental moments of stage patter (hey, she was home—give her a break), her City Winery set was cool and warm and cutting in all the right places, softly emotional and smartly lyrical throughout. And consistently evocative of a life lived on the always-picturesque road, and in the deepest recesses of her mind.
—A.D. Amorosi
