Jane Beeson who performs / releases music under her last name played the WFNM night at Hotel Ziggy the Wednesday prior to Thanksgiving. This was my second time catching a set. My first time catching one of her sets was at the same location back in July. I was hesitant to head out on Wednesday night as I knew I had to wake up early on Thanksgiving to do some food preparation, but getting a second chance to catch Beeson won out.
 |
| Beeson at Hotel Ziggy |
Beeson provides her singer-songwriter tunes a tender emotional touch. When it comes to the singer-songwriter genre, for Beeson, one needs to extend songwriter to something like storysongwriter. She provides little nuggets behind her songs to give them additional meaning to her listeners.
 |
| Beeson at Hotel Ziggy |
While introducing her song "Just For Now" she told the story about meeting her best friend in Los Angeles. "I had no friends. I had just gotten back from a show in Phoenix. I flew back this one morning and had to go back to work after . . . . I'm a nanny, normalize nanning . . . I had to go back to work that afternoon and I didn't really want to and I was really thinking about needing a friend . . . . and so I was writing this song 'Just For Now' when a girl approached me on the beach and was like 'Hey, do you make music?' And I was like 'Yeah.' And she was like 'I'm a horse trainer, but I really want to be a singer-songwriter.' And I was like, 'I used to be a horse girl I believe we can offer each other something here.' And now we're best friends and we live together."
And talking about friends, as can be seen in this Instagram post, she's a fan of the TV show Friends with the comment, "the highly anticipated phoebe to rachel arc."
 |
| Beeson at Hotel Ziggy |
During this set, she didn't play my favorite song from her catalog "I Haven't Seen You Since Summer." I won't highlight that song (other than mentioning it, of course). Based on Spotify plays, it is by far and away her top played song. I'll give some love to a song that was on the pre-Thanksgiving setlist.
That song is "everybody's baby" and Beeson introduced the song by saying, "This last one is a song about a friendship breakup. This topic is hugely unwritten about and I'm making a change by talking about it in my music." What first stands out to me is the lack of capitalization in the song title. Some bands and singers do extensively use lower case in their band names and song titles. For Beeson, there is only one other song that uses lower case. Does this mean anything? Maybe not. But maybe it is meant to show a degree of bitter sadness.
 |
| Beeson at Hotel Ziggy |
She played the set solo with just her vocals and an acoustic guitar. It lent to that sense of abandonment that comes through in the lyrics. Vocals are near whisper level as she sings the lyrics that I imagine caused tears to write, "I'll never know what I did. I'll never gеt to fix this." As the song comes to its conclusion, she screamed out the lyrics "you're everybody's baby."
The two times I've seen her, she's played solo sets. I hope I can catch a full band set one of these days. There's some lovely composition and backing vocals in the released version of the song.
No comments:
Post a Comment