Newcomer plays to Buskirk crowd

Dee Hupp-Sanders will likely never forget her first night as a volunteer usher at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater.

That night, Bloomington music legend Carrie Newcomer released her new CD with a concert for a sold-out crowd of hundreds of fans and friends.

“It’s kind of folk, but, you know, it’s got a spirit to it. Very heartfelt,” Hupp-Sanders said Saturday as she passed out programs to patrons.

The first time she saw Newcomer was through the summer series of free concerts at Third Street Park.

“I was just taken with the passion she has for sharing her gift,” Hupp-Sanders said, adding that despite Newcomer’s success, the singer still returns to perform for free.

The opening act was local band the Honneycombs, who mixed fast-paced up-beats with flowing melodies. The group’s performance included songs  such as “Fleeting,” “Little Moon” and “Rite of Spring.”

“Actually, it’s our CD release party, too,” April Combs said to the audience. “We thank Carrie so much for sharing this stage with us tonight — such a treat.”

After the band’s performance and a short intermission, a screen descended from above the stage filled with the projected image of Newcomer’s CD cover, a woman on a train. As the audience watched, the “train” began to move, transporting them to the Taj Mahal, the pyramids, a cruise ship, a desert, even the “American Gothic” couple and a random cow, followed by a barn with a silo and eventually the familiar landmarks of the courthouse downtown and ending with the Buskirk itself.

Audience members laughed and applauded as the screen raised and Buskirk-Chumley Theater Executive Director Danielle McClelland introduced the evening’s headliner.

“We knew her before you could hear her songs on NPR and in major bookstores around the country, before she traveled the world and brought famous Indian musicians to share the stage with her as she’ll be doing for Lotus Summer Nights, and we’ll always long for there not to be an ‘after,’ but for the music to go on and on,” McClelland said. “Please welcome Carrie Newcomer.”

Between songs, Newcomer spoke to the audience as if to a group of friends, telling jokes and sharing her thoughts.

She performed the title track of her new CD, “Before and After,” explaining there are some things where “this happened and nothing is ever the same again,” including birth, death and graduation.

She described a “Ghost Train” as “the things that we are afraid of that may or may not be real,” like a will-o-the-wisp or St. Elmo’s Fire.

Newcomer later asked who’d seen the recent children’s movie “Up.”

“I wept through the whole thing behind my 3-D glasses,” she said with a laugh. She then referred to the dog, Dug, who is easily distracted from his train of thought at one point by a squirrel.

“I love that; I love ‘squirrel.’ I live in ‘squirrel,’” she laughed. “It’s become a shorthand reference at our house — ‘You’re gonna squirrel on me, aren’t you, Carrie?’”
Before starting her song “Geodes,” she laughed and said, “It’s about the official Monroe County rock.”

“All these things that we call familiar are just miracles clothed in the commonplace,” she sang, accompanied by Chris Wagoner on strings, cellist Mary Gaines and pianist Gary Walters. “We have come to believe there’s hidden good in common things.”