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Monday night, and I am once again on The Other Side of the Bear. And the Red Sox are once again sucking all the life out of the room, so Max Heinegg begins playing for four of us. I don't like his voice to start with, but as his set progresses, he warms up and it sounds much better. I'm quite liking it by the end, but these songs don't really grab me. They're kind of hollow, somehow, and I get a sense that I might like them much better with his band, The High Ceilings. I'll have to check them out. It also doesn't help that he, too, seems more interested in what the Sox are doing than in what he's playing.
Up next is Lanky, who is, in fact. He's up from New Jersey, doing the solo-guitar traveling troubador thing. Lanky's got a great voice, and is a really polished, really interesting singer. In several songs he spends a lot of time dancing around his break, almost using it as another instrument, jumping back and forth between the upper part of his regular range and the lower part of his (quite good) falsetto. That sounds dangerously close to yodeling, but it doesn't come off that way at all. His guitar and melodies are good. His lyrics are a little silly--the happy songs are all about girls, while the sad songs are all about girls--but he's young. He'll find more to write about. He also covers "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses," and points out that since he and Max have both played U2 covers, Ad will have to do so as well. (I didn't recognize Max's.)
There are some more people here by the time Ad Frank plays, though it's still a slow night. The one advantage of this is that we get a very loose, interactive set, with lots of requests. My own request, "If I Find Another One of Your Bobby Pins in My Bed, I Am Coming By to Shove them Up Your Ass," is a surprisingly (considering the title) lovely, gentle piano song of sheer heartbreak. The piano is lush and gorgeous tonight, and I'm really mystified when Ad switches to guitar, saying he's been sucking on piano. I can't imagine what "good" would sound like. The guitar songs are more upbeat and raucous, (and include, yes, a U2 cover) and he turns the evening the rest of the way around when he closes with the optimistic rocker "A Little Devotion," another favorite of mine.
