Austin, TX: 3/19/04
Austin “Favorite Daughter” Trish Murphy is back at South By Southwest after a few years of internal exile. The room at the Crowne Plaza’s 18th floor lounge is much smaller than La Zona Rosa’s the last time around (the view is better, though!) but the show is utterly spectacular, an exciting blend of rock, country, and honky-tonk wrapped around Trish’s unmistakable voice and sometimes Dylanesque phrasing. She is happy and at ease, the band (including her brother Darin on drums, last seen with her on Tuesday at the Swollen Circus) is just right, full and strong without being overpowering, and the blend of the two makes for one of those gigs that stay etched in one’s memory.
Trish plays mostly brand new songs from her latest album Girls Get In Free, and along the way we learn about dreaming of Lucinda Williams singing on a flatbed truck in Cleveland, about the perils of innertubing on the Guadalupe, and we chuckle at her self-inflicted blonde joke and at Darin’s quote from The Mighty Quinn. All that and a standing ovation are a fitting cap to Friday night in Austin.
[At this point, the laptop crashed. To be continued in the next installment.]