WLSC review from Friday the 15th

As if the rain gods were offering up a gesture of good will, the clouds cleared up early yesterday evening and allowed a stream of people to fill up the Lucky Cat for the first night of the Williamsburg Live Songwriting Competition. Sure, the guitar cases helped me identify some of the songwriter contestants in attendance, but I could have picked them out from the anxiously excited expressions on their faces. With Tom Rhodes taking the reigns as the slightly dangerous MC, the competition took off and when the drone of the air conditioner was all that remained, 3 winners were cheered on to the semi-finals: Lizzie Grant, Dan Torres and Sarah Rabdau.

Grant’s sound is shy, damaged and sympathetic. Her “Pawn Shop Blues” was filled with touching metaphors and the sad, wavering delivery won over the room. You aren’t awed by music like this so much as you fall in love with it. The other two winners performed with go-for-the-throat grandiosity. Easily possessing the most powerful voice of the evening, Torres wailed off a room-filling song called “Where I Stand.” Indeed, by the time he had finished, it was clear from the enthusiastic audience response where he stood: the ghost of Jeff Buckley has raised a new prophet for the hopeful who own a tear-stained copy of “Grace.” These two writers dueled with guitars, while Rabdau choose piano to deliver “Autumn Spills.” She falls into the Tori Amos school of showmanship and during a musical breakdown she grasped the microphone in true rock star fashion. There was more than a little Rufus Wainwright in her style as well, and as Rabdau sang “autumn spills into my window / I think I’ll go back to him,” many of us knew exactly what she was talking about.