The last time Mandolin Orange came to DC, they unveiled the heavy folksongs of Tides of a Teardrop, newly released less than a week before the show. Featuring singles like “Golden Embers” and “The Wolves”, the songs practically buzzed into life quietly, beautifully, well-suited to midwinter’s passage.
This time, coming to Lincoln Theater, those songs certainly featured – as they should – but Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz delivered a more expansive setlist, exploring transformation, warmth, and a bit of the blues.
Andrew and Emily make music without boundaries, fitting under the umbrellas of americana, bluegrass, country, and oddly enough, even landing on Billboard’s rock chart. At the Lincoln Theater, the show they delivered certainly had heavier elements than the last few times I personally saw them, their hushed songs becoming less like the whisper of a few wings and much closer to the sound of starlings.
They began the show with “Take This Heart of Gold” from Blindfaller, a record that featured most on the night, before sliding into the old but impossibly lovely “There Was a Time” off their first record, This Side of Jordan. “The Wolves”, recently played on The Today Show, followed, with Andrew and Emily joking about how much harder it felt to play in the morning, particularly in front of everyone they know (read: family), a little comment that came across as wry, humorous.
A few more surprises came throughout the night, like “Morphine Girl” and “Wake Me” from Haste Make / Hard Hearted Stranger. Or the lovely instrumental “Buried in a Cape”from Andrew’s solo record, which he introduced by telling a story of John Hartford being buried in a three-piece suit and a Batman cape.
The band around Andrew and Emily helped set the stage afire throughout the night, including (I think) Christian Sedelmyer playing fiddle alongside Emily, as well as a crack rhythm section to augment Andrew’s mandolin playing. Throughout the night, the stage mostly lit orange, the music bounced warmly in the theater’s darkness, like fires crackling off the walls and lulling the audience into a state of stuporous joy.
A significant highlight on the night had to be “Golden Embers”, a song Andrew introduced with a Fiona Apple quote, “When I’m happy, I don’t stop to write,” adding that he can relate to that and “everyone has to know how miserable I am.” It’s a grief-filled song that has carried me through some of my own sorrows this year: it delves into the anguish he felt following his mother’s death, painting a portrait of how and his father coped with the despair of loss. It is not a lamentation, but rather an elegiac hymn that yearns, at its core, to identify lightness and being.
The set closer, “Wildfire” burnt the stage a little brighter, and the encore included another Blindfaller tune in “Echo” and a starkly beautiful rendition of Emmylou Harris’s “Easy From Now On.”
Mandolin Orange are playing the nearby Weinberg Center in Frederick, MD. Make sure you go see them.
