On Tuesday evening at Jammin’ Java, folk/Americana singer-songwriter Eliza Gilkyson treated her audience to a lovely evening of deeply thoughtful, gorgeous songs, setting the atmosphere with delightful stories of life and family. The two-time Grammy-nominated artist, approaching 70, has lost none of the quality of her marvelous alto voice, sounding, at times, like a peak-era Lucinda Williams without the twang. Gilkyson also compares to Williams as a heartfelt lyricist, especially in her work over the last 20 years.
Both had the advantage of growing up in the arts. While Williams’s father was a poet, Gilkyson’s father, Terry, was a successful musician, first with a folk threesome, the Easy Riders, who she described as a sort of predecessor to the Kingston Trio. Later, Terry went to work for Disney, composing songs for animated films, some of them quite well known, like “Bare Necessities.” Eliza closed her first set with her own version of her father’s song “Fast Freight,” a take on a hobo-train song with a female protagonist.
Eliza’s grandmother, Phoebe Hunter-Gilkyson, would help out her father with his lyrics. Terry based “The Solitary Singer” on a poem she wrote, and he used it as the closing number for his armed services radio show. Eliza commented that her father said “nature is a greater intelligence.”
Eliza’s father is not the only other Gilkyson in the music business. Her brother, Tony, played in the punk band X from 1986 to 1995, and has a career of his own as a singer-songwriter. Late in her first set, Eliza played Tony’s song “Death In Arkansas,” about a ghost who cannot find its bones because there’s been too much development. She mentioned how she’d thought of this song when she was driving up the back way to the Tulsa airport and came across what had once been a rural, out-of-the-way graveyard.
Eliza opened her first set with “Instrument,” which she said she’d using as an invocation. She played piano, and her accompanist, Jim Henry, lightly played electric guitar. Afterward, she said that her grandkids are graduating high school, and joked that she had her children at 12.
Eliza switched to acoustic guitar for “Through the Looking Glass,” and Jim played the mandolin. Eliza told the audience that her latest album, Secularia, is “spiritual music for atheists” that is meant to “express a sense of wonder.” One of the influences on Secularia is the feminist theologian Mary Daly, who wrote the seminal book God The Father, in which she argued that if God is man, then man—literally, men—is God. Eliza was deeply concerned with the practical effects of the portrayal of God as a male figure, such as the way we treat the Earth. She tackled these subjects in “In the Name of the Lord.”
Eliza wrote her previous album, The Nocturne Diaries, when was awake in the middle of the night, obsessing over anxieties she was able to push away in the daytime. Her favorite, explored in “Eliza Jane,” is death. Before playing “Roses at the End of Time,” a love song, Eliza brought up Three Women and the Truth, a trio she plays in with Mary Gauthier and Gretchen Peters, each critically acclaimed in their own right. Strange as it may seem, she said, she has the happiest songs of the three. “I’ve been lucky in love,” she said.
After “Fast Freight,” Eliza and Jim took a break and headed to the merch table. In a smart move, Eliza provided a sheet for audience members to list their song requests for the second set. Response was enthusiastic, and Eliza got more requests than she could fulfill, but she played as many as she reasonably could. She opened with “Blue Moon Night,” and followed with “Think About Think You.”
Eliza’s 11th-great-grandfather, Jedediah, was a Brigadier General in George Washington’s army during the Revolutionary War. His letters to his own father have surived. Based on these letters, Eliza wrote “Jedediah 1777,” set in his time at Valley Forge, during the second Bush presidency, as a protest song.
After playing “Beauty Way,” she struggled to tune her guitar. She remarked that Joni Mitchell uses a digital guitar, which allows the user to simply punch up the desired tuning. Eliza got her guitar tuned and played “Tender Mercies,” then “Borderline.” She told the audience that she built her latest album around the song “Seculare.”
The southwest has profoundly affected Eliza and her songwriting. Eliza wrote “Midnight in Raton” after stopping at the bottom of the Raton Pass, fearful of being caught in the snow after dark. Stuck in a cheap motel, she thought about Townes Van Zandt, who wrote “Snowin on Raton,” going over the pass with a bottle next to him on the seat. Also set in New Mexico is “Lights of Santa Fe.” She spoke about Barton Springs Pool, an outdoor public pool in her home city of Austin, which is filled with natural spring water. On the full moon, people come out late at night to swim together. This forms the subject matter of “Wildwood Spring.”
After closing her second set with “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Eliza received a standing ovation. She returned for an encore and played “Peace Call,” a song that Woody Guthrie wrote but never performed or published. I stopped to meet Eliza after the concert, and shared a book I’d heard about many years ago, God’s Phallus, which describes the problems created for Jewish men by the maleness of God. She seemed genuinely fascinated, and was a pleasure to talk to.
Artists like Eliza don’t write songs to score hits. They have clear, distinctive visions that they follow, and these may lead to places that may not be especially fashionable. But they write and sing with such emotion, honesty, and intelligence, that if you’re willing to go on a journey to somewhere new and different, to explore new horizons, they can be glorious tour guides. If you’re just in it for a hook, than top 40 is the place for you. But if you’re interested in discovery, self and otherwise, Eliza is the sort of artist to listen to.
Have a listen to Eliza Gilkyson on Spotify.
Lead photo by Philip Rosenthal and courtesy of the artist.
