Damien Jurado at Eddie's Attic, Decatur, June 29, 2019

Yesterday, we spent a few hours of our first full day of retirement in Decatur, Georgia at folk-music venue Eddie's Attic with singer-songwriter Damien Jurado.

Portland's Corrina Repp opened.  We often find solo acoustic singer/songwriters, which is really just a long, roundabout way of saying what we used to call "folk singers," tedious, and if it weren't for our appreciation of the sheer artistry of Mr. Jurado, we probably wouldn't have gone to this show.  Which is to say, we didn't have high hopes for the opener's set, but we were very pleased to hear Ms. Repp's performance.

Rather than just strumming chords to accompany her singing, she let her electric guitar reverberate and echo, and used a repeater pedal to produce interesting soundscapes to support her fine voice.  The sequential processing portions of our brain loved hearing how she created new textures and structures, even if we didn't experience any veridical rushes of familiarity.

It was a very good set, and we hope to hear more from Ms. Repp in the future.

Damien Jurado did, in fact, just strum along on his guitar as he sang - no pick, just his thumb across the strings.  But the fascination with Mr. Jurado's music is not in his accompaniment (although we've heard him in a variety of settings, from full band to solo), but in his singing and the raw emotional honesty he brings to his dark songs.  He has a voice and a quiet presence that fills a room, and even though we recognized very few of last night's songs, we were spellbound throughout the set.

If we recall correctly, Jurado opened with the song Lincoln from his latest album In the Shape of a Storm.  After that, it was all new to us, including at least one song he introduced as his first time playing it in public.  Toward the end of the set, he played Museum of Flight  from 2012's Maraqopa, arguably our favorite album of his and one of the few vinyl records we actually own.

But other than that, it was all new to us, which made it all feel even more like Mr. Jurado was speaking honestly from the heart directly to us.

Bonus points: it was an early show (7:00 p.m. start). Eddie's likes to run two shows on a Saturday night, and after being treated to a fine set, we were home by 10:00. 

We watched the movie Ex Machina on Netflix to close out our night.