By Michael Devlin
Here’s a duo who perform simple, well-written and played songs. Annie has a grown-up girl next-door voice as she sings with a slightly flat Midwestern accent. Rod plays various guitars and banjos. They are not trying to dazzle with flashy playing or show stopping vocals, but the songs are truly told with a beautiful eye for detail. Annie’s voice is disarming as she effortlessly captures your attention with her narrative stories. The music eases through various styles, every bit of it well played in straightforward arrangements that could easily be taken on the road. If this album is any indication, one could imagine being at one of their concerts begging them to play just one more song far into the night.
Capps duo is a mature entry in folkie-songwriter genre
by Chris Rietz
"In This Town," coming out Tuesday, is the fifth album from longtime Ann Arbor songwriting luminary Annie Capps and her multi-instrumentalist/musical director husband, Rod.
In years past, they were bandmates in Detroit-based bands Dreamstreet and Foolish Mortals; Annie is also a charter member of the Yellow Room Gang, a sort of Ann Arbor songwriter mafia and occasional performance group with the Mustard's Retreat boys, Whit Hill, Kitty Donohoe, Matt Watroba, David Barrett and others.
Annie and Rod sing songs and play guitars; and the folkie- songwriter genre can seem so overpopulated and colorless that many listeners simply won't be interested. That's too bad, because Annie Capps is an exception, and the reasons why make a fairly long list.
First of all, Annie is a grownup, and the mature outlook of an artist who's tended her own garden well for a long time is refreshing, in a genre seemingly owned by youthful angst (or narcissism). "In Time" (we think he meant "In This Town") is the final break from her confessional style of the past, and her song's narratives are now entirely fiction - a parallel universe where real truth resides.
In this regard, "In This Town" is her breakout album. The songs are deliciously underwritten, almost snapshots, and the best are vignettes that suggest vastly more than they depict. "Find a Smile" is a trucker-and-his-lonely-wife song with a dark undercurrent unlike any other trucker song; "The Ring" is a masterfully crafted anecdote about finding a diamond ring in a pile of shattered glass.
Annie and Rod also resist the temptation to affect a countrified sound, the haven du jour for countless mediocre songwriters. Annie has a warm, little- girl voice that never drawls, nor does she force it into uncomfortable territory; it's unmannered and direct, and it's always appealing.
Because she's the singer - and more or less the sole songwriter - Annie may be the star of the show. But Rod gets equal billing, and rightfully so: the arrangements and production are his bailiwick. Note how his funk bass bounces off Annie's ukulele in "Tumbling Down," likely the first such pairing ever; and how his facile, quicksilver guitar-playing fills the album with spark yet somehow never gets in the way.
Chris Rietz works at Elderly Instruments in Lansing. His reviews appear every other week in What's On. Contact him at crietz-lsj@comcast.net.
“If I lived in this town, I would frequent this café,” sings Annie Capps “and that table in the corner would be mine most every day.” Capps has a way of starting a song with an image that’s simple yet arresting enough to propel you through the ensuing developments, which often cover quite a bit of territory. That one leads to a whole imagined new existence for an unhappy woman, resembling the one that unexpectedly comes to fruition in Anne Tyler’s novel The Ladder of Years. Quite a few of her songs instantly place you in the protagonist’s mind: “Crossed the Mississippi, said good-bye to you/Hello to the road and a new thought or two.”
Capps is one of a group of Ann Arbor songwriters (sometimes known as the Yellow Room Gang) who have created a genuine local scene and often taken it on the road to metro Detroit and northwestern Ohio and the northern Lower Peninsula. One among their number, Jan Krist, coined the term “Midwest Urban folk” to describe the music they make – they are all into detailed songcraft, but they grew up in Michigan amid rock and Motown and country, and there’s usually a beat of one kind or another running through the music. Annie Capps works with her husband Rod on guitars and other strings, and her band often features the subtle percussion of Christine Schinker. They form a tight, symbiotic group that sets a mood for Capps’ songs without over-whelming them.
Capps has been writing songs since she was eleven, and the music on her older albums often had an appealing mixture of confession and sass. When she comes to the Ark on Friday, June 22, she’ll have a new release, In This Town. I’ve heard a working version and it’s terrific. Capps has some great story songs – the title track quoted above and The Ring, a virtuoso effort about a woman who is sweeping up shattered glass [] and spots a wedding ring in the debris. As her reflections unfold – “The trouble with hope is the way that it shatters” – they’re periodically qualified by a little “sometimes, anyways” that makes the whole funny-sad set of images reverberate in the brain.
Capps also broadens her range on In This Town, probably under the influence of her Yellow Room Gang associates. Some of her new songs tackle big spiritual questions the way that Krist does, and others have a bit of Whit Hill’s quirky outlook. That’s how you make a promising scene grow, and those who follow Michigan songwriting or just want to check some out should come on down to the Ark for Annie Capps turn in the spotlight.
