Concert Review: Richard Shindell at Bombyx, Florence, MA, 10/22/2023

“So, where were we?” asked Richard Shindell innocently Sunday at Bombyx in Florence, Mass., He sang “I remember everything” in “Geshsemani,” his first tune, then recalled one of his last live shows before the pandemic was at the nearby Iron Horse in Northampton.

He then told the sold-out crowd—average age a bit older than his 62—how he’d fled home to Argentina on the last plane into the country and retreated to the Pampas. There, as he wryly sang next in the new “Tactical,” encroached-upon foxes protested the invasion of Shindell, wife and children by launching a, shall we say, scatalogical attack. 

Not many Jersey-born, Long Island-raised, Hobart-trained singer-songwriters live mostly in Buenos Aires. But Shindell’s writing grew at home, equal parts Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, James McMurtry, John Prine, and sometime bandmate John Gorka, whose humor and rich baritone Shindell’s onstage delivery most resembled Sunday.

That said, he also seemed richly original, very much himself, and comfortably, charmingly at ease. 

Among fan favorites that earned recognition applause in the first few bars, Shindell introduced new numbers, including the fight with the foxes and, right after that, one he said was neither new nor finished. Its theme was freedom, maybe more easily found elsewhere. And he stayed political, apprehensively commenting on the election underway in Argentina. Acknowledging his new tune would be “really weird,” the slam he put on Ayn Rand in “Atlas Choking” hit hard. Who else name-checks Rand, Alan Greenspan AND Yul Brynner in a criticism of “rational greed.”

Political shout-outs greeted the sad, anti-war “Reunion Hill, compellingly mournful. 

In addition to spicing the show with fresh ingredients, Shindell detoured bravely in his laid-back presentation. Setting his acoustic guitar aside, he read the poem ”Adirondack Hotel Landfill”from a binder of writings. He teased about what stanzas he’d share, then mock-cringed at the result, despite his fans’ attentive listening and applause.

He took up his electric guitar, fussed around with it, then set it aside – “not feeling it!” – and re-grabbed the acoustic, charging the crowd as guinea pigs for new songs.

Describing his block in Buenos Aires, he sang the fresh tale of a moped food delivery guy in a near-miss collision with the 113 bus in “Progress and Mortar,” the streets intersecting at the scene of the almost-crash.

This put him in a motoring mood; he drove with the trucker sagas “Kenworth of My Dreams” and “Next Best Western,” capped by the bad-driving lament “Transit,” set on the New Jersey Turnpike. (This, incidentally, is from Shindell’s “Somewhere Near Paterson,” his first album for Northampton-based Signature Sounds, which also operates the Parlor Room. But I digress.)

Climbing out of the cab of these song-vehicles, he followed with a poem on the Buddhist concept of “skillful means”—less esoteric than it sounds and atmospherically/emotionally a nice lead in for the new, pastoral “Let’s Build a Fire.” This was so new, in fact, that Shindell stopped, a bit confused about the key, then restarted.

Another October song followed, the bitter Halloween night break-up lament “Are You Happy Now;” some actually sang along here. 

Winding up, but slowly, Shindell expressed his gratitude on returning to the Valley “to find you still here.” Then he lit into “There Goes Mavis” with a tentative start, a bit like Michael Franks’ cozy understatement. Then he built a groove that rocked in a restrained, well-mannered way but generated real momentum, more than the truck songs had.

Here he cut loose on guitar, after playing mostly contained accompaniment that packaged rather than pushed the tunes. 

After showcasing his own songs, old and new, Shindell offered Leonard Cohen’s “Leaving Alexandra” as very welcome encore; a characteristically graceful Cohen melody under lyrics adapted from poet Constantine Cavafy.

For Shindell, this was warm homecoming; for his fans packing Bombyx, his return seemed every bit as poignant – except when everybody was laughing at Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan.

At 105 miles door to door from my house, driving to Bombyx Center for the Arts and Equity is like four runs to Caffe Lena where I last saw him years ago; but a nice pilgrimage since he isn’t playing closer on this tour and the trees over the Berkshires were going full Kodachrome. A newish non-profit set up in a freshly refurbished church, the place joins a Pioneer Valley music scene undergoing substantial change as Northampton’s Iron Horse and Calvin Theater change hands amid announcements they’ll soon reopen, and the Parlor Room and other newish venues have opened in recent years. Shindell was quite correct in pronouncing Bombyx, after his encore, “a lovely room, and a lovely sounding room.”