Ariel Smith Photos
Shakey Graves brought Americana — and a New Haven native — back to College Street Music Hall, accompanied by Harrisonburg, Virginia, duo Illiterate Light.
The show began right at eight on Thursday night; Illiterate Light delivered loud, energetic indie rock with a standing drum kit, performing singles such as “I Wanna Leave America,” “Better Than I Used To,” and “Growin’ Down.” Their experimental side came out in the (seemingly impromptu) interludes members Jake Cochran and Jeff Gorman offered throughout the set, during which everyone, not quite sure how to follow the beat, bobbed along anyway.
Shakey Graves is the moniker of Alejandro Rose-Garcia, who’s clearly at his most comfortable alone onstage with a guitar and a hollow suitcase attached to a kick pedal. His performance was marked by two things. First, it was long — he played for well over an hour and came back onstage for a multi-song encore. Second, he treated the audience as if we were in someone’s living room, hearing demos from a friend. With almost every song came an opportunity to learn more, an entreaty to either take the following material seriously or to lend it almost no weight at all.
“Georgia Moon,” we learned, was a story about drinking moonshine and going to Tennessee. While drinking the moonshine, Rose-Garcia and his friend drove down the highway in the rain — something, he was sure to caution, we should not do, before telling us how a line in the song was lifted from a billboard.
After about five songs or so, the rest of his band came out, including a New Haven native, bassist Jon Shaw. His parents were in attendance, which helpfully solved the mystery of why someone had inexplicably screamed “I love you, Jon Shaw!” at the beginning of the performance. The band took the audience through “Pansy Waltz,” “Mansion Door,” “Dearly Departed,” and “The Perfect Parts” — even upstairs, in the seated section, people were on their feet dancing.
The show ended as it began, after the rest of the band traipsed offstage and Rose-Garcia made his way back over to the red suitcase and that kick pedal. “Word of Mouth,” we learned, was about bad advice, “which I have given tons of in my life, and probably have received an equal amount of,” he offered while switching to a white guitar.
By the end of the show, we’d all learned to hold our cheers at the beginning of a new song and await the story of its inception. “This is a love song I wrote when I was 17,” Rose-Garcia confided before launching into a rendition of “Tomorrow,” “but I realized when I was 23 that it wasn’t even a love song. It’s about being afraid about what’s next in life, and how if you say yes to something, you could lose it.”
