You should all be beating yourselves up for missing Damien Jurado on Thursday. You should be grieving the fact that you’ve never heard of him, and that you didn’t know he was in town. Because you missed one of the most naturally gifted songwriters making music right now, and you’ll probably never hear about him anywhere else.
Jurado is a heavyset guy from Seattle and is clearly an ‘indoor kid’ — as are his fans. Most of the crowd were pale, late-twenties/early-thirties guys, almost all either skinny or fat. The reason I know you missed him is that only a handful of us indoor kids were there to see him at the Rock and Roll Hotel — which I maintain is the best venue in the District.
A number of us pre-gamed his show by watching the VP debates upstairs in the bar, which got us nice and depressed, just in time to be pulled into absolute despair by Jurado’s sad-story songs. Many of his tunes are spare, bleak little narratives about tragic moments in ordinary lives. (See his MySpace.) Jurado is married with a son and teaches pre-school when he’s not making music. How depressing could his life really be?
His performances are notoriously low-energy, and this he delivered on Thursday. He sits slumped in a stiff chair, holding his acoustic guitar on his lap, while his two accompanying musicians rotate around him between drums, keys, electric guitar and backing up his wavering vocals.
He hates touring (read this Paste article about the things he loves), and that disdain shows up on stage as the furrowed scowl of Reality. But the colossal weight of his show left me feeling a sense of communion in the many, smaller disappointments of my own life. By singing about real loneliness, he makes things seem less lonely. This effect is best captured in his earlier classic — Ohio.
Don’t miss him next time he comes to town — if for no other reason than to make him, and yourself, feel less alone.
