Last summer, to gather material for the article "Both Ends of the Rope: On Audiences and Venues" in the October, 2009 Victory Review, I sent out a request to acoustic musicians for stories about venues where they've played:

I'm gathering anecdotes about personal experiences with audiences and venues, good and bad. Mine range from warm nights at bonfires by the lake to getting drowned out by the blender whizzing behind the bar. What did you want from your audience? What did they want from you? Thanks for passing along your experiences.

Portland mandolinist-guitarist and songwriter Lincoln Crockett sent back this interesting response:

Off the top of my head: Audiences want to be loved. They want you to help them stimulate and release all the crap that they've tolerated during their week doing whatever it is that they do. I read Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age saying "My job is to bring the audience Friday night every night of the week." So true. So whether the blender is blaring or the lights are hot, the end message must be: I understand you and what you've been going through. I have some insight to offer, and with these notes tinkling around my voice we're going to hash it all out, get over it and get happy again.

For me, it feels like surfing. I ride the audience's attention like a wave. Down in the McMenamin's Winery on a slow night, or at a disinterested farmer's market moment, I call it "ditch digging" 'cause it's all effort and no high. You might as well be diggin' a ditch.

On stage at the Aladdin in Portland, the LaurelThirst Public House, the Old Liberty Theater in Ridgefield, or at a killer house concert, it's like the audience just needs a chance to be happy with someone, just to focus that long, listen to something beautiful, and let someone really try to please them. I get to be the eternal child-mind and they get to feel through me, laughing at how silly the things we take seriously are, in every other moment but this one.

Case in point: my song "Nothing Makes Me Feel Good," an honest and sarcastic examination of morbid depression, gets real laughs. They just needed to feel understood. We've all been there.

Three months later, in the article "Searching the Cutout Bins for New Year's Treasures" for the January 2010 Victory Review, I included a reference to Lincoln Crockett's 2007 solo album Angels & Devils Alike:

"Nothing Makes Me Feel Good"
on Lincoln Crockett, Angels & Devils Alike
(self published, 2007).

I heard Portland mandolinist-guitarist-songwriter Lincoln Crockett play this one on Thursday, October 1st at Conor Byrne Pub, for a $5 cover. He and singer-songwriter-fiddler Chris Kokesh were on the tail end of a regional tour celebrating her upcoming release October Valentine and his going on "hiatus." Later, I was glad that I'd picked up his solo album. It's a fine piece of work, meticulously self-produced and masterfully played, full of intricate arrangements that speak of long hours woodshedding to get the fingerings and mixes right.

For several years, Crockett and his friends have played a circuit of little clubs on either side of the Columbia river, with occasional forays up here. I heard him give a workshop on songwriting at the 2006 Northwest Folklife Festival, and got on his mailing list. Three years later, between sets that October night at Conor Byrne, he was saying wearily that "trying to make a living as a traveling musician is crazy." Yes it is. The two of them were lucky if they made $500 that night. From the stage, he joked while introducing this song that "depression is an occupational hazard, but songwriter gold." Yes, "There is clinical help for you. It's called music..."

The Conor Byrne is a venerable Seattle venue with a long history of welcoming acoustic musicians, but it has an odd shape. It's a long, narrow storefront with the bar on the left side, the stage in the back, and brick walls throughout that music and conversation bounce off with equal force. Loud couples drinking in the front nearer to the street can seem totally disconnected from the stage in the back where the show is going on. Crockett and Kokesh gave first-rate performances that night, driving well-crafted songs up through spirals of four-chord changes, then across unexpected cloud bridges into furious jams featuring tight 16th-note counterpoint between his mandolin and her fiddle, before descending gently to a landing on the other side. Those in the back, nearer to the stage, were moved and clapped happily.

Lincoln Crockett has posted two more albums to CD Baby, In Pictures and Play in the Yard. Now is taking a break. After several wearying years performing at all sorts of venues up and down the west coast, Crockett has gone on "hiatus" to spend less time on the road making strangers happy, and more time closer to those he loves. Because I enjoy his music, and know full well how frustrating it can be to perform acoustic music in noisy bars, I wanted to get an interview with him before he disappears from public altogether. So I sent him last month's description of his solo CD, and that did the trick. While on vacation with his young family, he sent back the thoughtful responses that follow.

[VR] You and Chris Kokesh work intricately together, like old musical friends. What was it like hitting the road with a partner such as Chris?

[Lincoln] Chris is SO wonderful to work with. The consummate professional, she's so seasoned in front of large audiences, and I learned a lot from her in that way. We also get along great, we're both pretty easy to get along with in general, so being cooped up in cars was easy. The real key was her amazing ear and musicality - she can add something warm to ANY music we ever played, and her appetite and enthusiasm for the variations on acoustic music that I'd been playing before we met made it fun to share. It's a real treasure to find musicians who are on the same page, have the same goals for how they want to feel with an audience, and the journey they want to take in the arch of a good performance, and that part is easy with Chris. I'm still not sure what that is exactly, but it's great chemistry!

[VR] Do you feel an appreciable difference between the Portland area audiences in the "home" circuit of clubs that you play either side of the Columbia River, and those up here in Seattle and elsewhere?

[Lincoln] Hmmm, that's a toughie. I found that the further south I go on this coast, the more people were willing to have what felt like jammy, free-formed musical experiences inside the song, and the further north I went people responded strongest to solid musicianship, clean presentation and a concise delivery. For me that made things a little more forgiving down southward, but no less appreciated.

[VR] Musicians will understand the casual control required to glide through shifts in dynamics and speed. For example, you'll suddenly drop away the rhythm part midway through a song as a verse begins, and then slip it back underneath and gradually build to the end. This helps to "wake up" our ears. What's it like in the clubs, trying to get audiences to come along with you on these little musical journeys?

[Lincoln] Oy! Dynamics, dynamics, dynamics! Tension and release. For me, I get loud and a bar listens for awhile, then quiet and they come back again. To be good at that dance of attention-getting, I really needed to be more like a Brittany Spears or a Michael Jackson. But I'm more of a reformed indie-shoegazer than a died-in-the-wool entertainer.

At best, my favorite moments over the past year were being a folksinger for a seated audience. There, dynamics gave me a sense that we were having a richer emotional experience. A whisper-soft vocal brings us all into a listening-to-the-space awareness that is like a vacation for the modern, harried, noise-encrusted ear. A spa!

[VR] On your album "Angels & Devils Alike," you often weave in choral harmonies, even during instrumental passages. How did you work with your supporting vocalists while recording such songs as "Sawdust Settler," "Gone Away," and "Open Wide"?

[Lincoln] On A&DA, all but one voice are me, the other is my engineer who heard the right part and I just had him do it. But just the same, I was very sensitive to where I added harmonies. As you so rightly noticed, it was a woodshedding process. I listened to the roughs, jotted down and trusted all my first impressions, and if I started harmonizing along to a vocal while listening I added it!

One of the boundaries that I set for myself was to play everything - I'd always wanted to do that. Sometimes in the instrumental portions I needed something to take up and soften the space around the plucked sounds the way a fiddle or keys might, and ended up creating accidental chorales behind me. Some, like the end of "Psychopaths," were spontaneous studio art, as much fun and part of the process as writing the songs in the first place!

[VR] Your quietly multilayered arrangements make use of a number of surprising sounds - the glockenspiel in "Sawdust Settler," the harmonium on "When Will You Come Home?," the mbira (thumb piano) on "Maybe Souls," and the Buddhist bell that opens "Believing." As you put these tracks together, did you come to think of them as "compositions" as well as "songs"?

[Lincoln] Hmmm. I never did, but I think you're right. In fact, I think of my songs as compositions, and weave whatever random twists and turns into them I will, even if it makes them overly complicated. I approached this recording with the same open-minded, satisfy-you-own-innate-creativity attitude as I do songwriting. I often had a sense that something was missing, and would look around to see what we had on hand to do the job. Then I would make it musical, make it fit.

The bell you mentioned is also inside the chorus of "Nothing Makes Me Feel Good," there's obsidian windchimes behind two of the codas, and I even used the sound of tapping on the mandolin and sliding my palms together to add drive to "When Will You come Home." And don't forget the sounds of Trout Creek near my house! It was really such a satisfying process. To have it really be enjoyed by so many people has been amazing.

[VR] The funky beat behind the song "Psychopaths" reminds me a little of a hilarious improvisation by David Grisman and Andy Statman, "Two White Boys Watching James Brown at the Apollo" on "Mandolin Abstractions." You seem comfortable using your considerable bluegrass chops to play original tunes with a blues beat and unexpected chromatic changes. Might we call this "blues grass," your own personal "dawg" music?

[Lincoln] Nice, I love the comparison! I'm trying to satisfy my creativity, find sounds I'm not hearing around me, scratch inner itches. I was calling it "progfolk" for a while in honor of all the intricate changes and juxtapositions I find myself attracted to. But I found out that was already taken by a style that's more like Jethro Tull than I think of myself. How about "Rhythm n' Bluesgrass?" If Dave can be the "Dawg," can I be the "Cat"?

[VR] The characters in your lyrics are quite the bunch of restless misfits. The "Sawdust Settler" says gruffly "Nothing will be as it was," the weary man in "Gone Away" says "I'm living half a life on the run," and the speaker in "I Begin Dreaming" tells a friend "You can call me on my bullshit." They sound like grown-ups who have put on some actual road miles.

[Lincoln] Yeah. My favorite attitude, it seems, is the good, clean look at things one gets when things are raw, real, humblingly imperfect, and yet somehow there's light shining through the cracks, always is. The heart keeps beating and the sun keeps rising for some reason, or maybe not, but as long as they're there... I heard once that Willie Nelson claims to only have written 2 songs in his career, about falling into love and falling out of love. I've only written one: "It sucked, but I transcended it."

[VR] As you began this album project, what were you hoping for? After all the work, how does the album that you made compare to what you wanted?

[Lincoln] It was something I had to do. It was time to make an album. Beyond that, well, I couldn't see beyond that. I just poured myself into it. Working with Tom Frisch engineering was awesome, his inherent practical attitude helped reign in my wide-open approach. In the end, it exceeded what I sought. Every note is as good as I could make it at the time, and the magic that seems to have resulted from lining all these songs up together is just, in my life, miraculous. I feel very lucky.

Note: Tom Frisch, who produced Angels & Devils Alike in his home studio, plays keyboards in the Portland band Lucky U, produces films and videos as Tom11 Films, builds custom Steadicam and lighting equipment, and is a member of Portland's Motion Collective. Crockett and Frisch provided the delicate sound track for a 2008 video made for the Columbia Land Trust, a regional land conservation organization that they both support.

[VR] You've let those of us on your mailing list know that you are going to take a "hiatus." How much of what you do musically will you give yourself a rest from? What will you continue to do?

[Lincoln] Right now I'm playing life the same way I do music: by ear. As we're talking, I'm in Bangkok, Thailand with my family on our sabbatical, enjoying some warmth and time to relax and unwind. Music still flies through me every day, but I'm letting go of writing down and capturing all the music in my head. I've learned that it will always be there when I need it, always, its part of something I feel in the world that's much larger. I'm not constantly obsessing over things to do, what work is left to do, 'cause doing things DIY it's never done: website, booking, business emails, phone calls, planning, logistics, keeping in touch with venues before shows, practice time, writing and judging new material and so much driving!!

I'm boiling my world down to a core that is focused on friends and family. I can never come back to doing it the way I did; I didn't have the constitution, and perhaps the maturity for it. But ask me what my favorite thing in the world is, and its still the same as it ever was: a song that moves me. For now, I'm wide open.

[VR] Thanks again, Lincoln, for your accomplished music.

Hank Davis

• Also by Hank Davis
• Jan. 2010: "Searching the Cutout Bins for New Year's Treasures"
• Dec. 2009: "Follow Marco: Chôro, Villa-Lobos, and Modal Jazz"
• Nov. 2009: "She Who Knows All Your B.S."
• Oct. 2009: "Both Ends of the Rope: On Audiences and Venues"
• Sept. 2009: "Politics and Popular Music"