They say when Bob Dylan performed a version of his "North Country Blues" you could hear a pin drop--and that's even evidenced in the recordings. Perhaps an incarnation of that very Dylan some 50 years down the line, José González's show at the Beacon Theatre last night, March 24, proved that in this technological era, an audience can still listen to a man and his guitar and sit in awe of someone's delicate talent.
And delicate is an accurate term to describe the performance, which started out with the singer and his guitar and later saw yMusic bat clean up. A voice that sounds like a breeze, Mr. González uttered no more than a few words the entire evening outside the context of his songs. Both yMusic and he, instead, let the music do all the talking.
Touring in support of 2015's Vestiges & Claws, the setlist stretched to other iterations of the folk singer's canon (e.g. 2007's In Our Nature, 2003's Veneer and he even brandished a Junip song "Line of Fire" at one point). The latest album, however, featured more instrumentation than his previous recordings. But that hasn't done much to change the singer's musical output. Vestiges just sounds like José, nothing more and nothing less.
But that isn't to slight the quality of the artist and his content. No, rather, this material can still soar even in 2016, an era saturated with EDM one-timers and Bowie-leeches. No one spoke, no one heckled and the walls of the Beacon Theatre vibrated slightly, reverberating José's slight croon (which was just barely mixed above the guitar).
The slowness of some of his songs, though, could drag on if not framed appropriately. Enter yMusic, who relayed the set, adding color in certain places but also maintaining the songs' internal structure. It was C.J. Camieri's trumpet playing that brought out a different reaction from the crowd, too, and it may have been one of the most key components in keeping each song an isolated piece.
Also, Mr. González felt compelled to incorporate the Arthur Russell tune "This Is How We Walk on the Moon" into his set.
José's songs don't meander like other folkies tend to do with slower paced material. Instead of wandering empty roads, José said what needed to be said and then got out of there, a rare discipline not often found in this sonic world.
There were moments infused with more energy, also. And it was the ultimate song, "Killing For Love," that the energy of the room manifested. A mic'ed foot tap, a rougher attack in his picking and some masterful soloing by the yMusic rank, José González concluded the show with a standing ovation and yielded a response from a crowd so loving that you, for a moment, felt transported to a different time or a different day.
There's a Fionn Regan lyric that has always sounded like a bold insight, "You see yourself as a child and it brings you tears." This idea of looking inward, reflecting on the innocence of one's youth and their now-lost naivety, it's a metaphor for something larger and inexplicable. José's music possesses this quality and forces the listener to pause and listen. Not unlike a heartbeat, the rhythmic sensation of Mr. González's music can be equated with the essential organ us humans need to survive. That is to say, José's music may have the most heart I've heard in a very long time.
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