Wayfaring Strangers

[October 8th, 2008]

“It’s like a Unitarian church in here—it’s so quiet,” Chris Funk tells the tightly packed crowd at inner-Northeast Portland’s LaurelThirst Public House, a brick-and-mirrors neighborhood staple with bicycles and Christmas lights hanging above the bar. Funk smirks and finishes his thought with stand-up timing: “Talk! Order a beer! Jesus Christ.”

Despite the theater atmosphere, LaurelThirst isn’t usually this busy ’round happy hour on a Wednesday night. But this is the debut of “Two Beers Veirs,” a monthlong weekly residency featuring two high-profile local musicians: heralded singer-songwriter and Seattle transplant Laura Veirs and Funk, guitarist for the Decemberists.

The tattooed bar-back looks a little flustered by the abnormally large crowd as she squeezes between tables to pick up an empty pint glass. But the music that emanates from the ’Thirst’s tiny corner stage—where Veirs, in a bright red flower-print dress over her cowboy boots, Funk, in a characteristically casual (non-Confederate) soldier shirt and jeans, and violinist Annalisa Tornfelt perform—sounds pretty familiar. Veirs is singing a lively rendition of Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train,” a somber folk-blues tune from just before the turn of the century. This is what LaurelThirst’s regular patrons are used to, even if tonight’s crowd only hosts a handful of regulars.

The bar has a rich history of outsider Americana, a reputation Funk remembers hearing about years ago while living in Eugene. “Everybody would talk about the eastside sound, which was like, Golden Delicious, Billy Kennedy, Lynn Conover, Little Sue, Jim Boyer, Bingo...I was really excited about it. Then I came up and I was like, ‘This is it?,’” he joked. “But it was awesome. And the happy hours to me are always the coolest. They’re really hoppin’.”

“On this one I’d like you to stomp or clap or something,” Veirs tells the crowd, which has been chatty since Funk’s mood-lightening joke. “This is an old song about chickens.” Veirs begins to dip from side to side, her pigtails swaying in the club’s yellow lights. “Let’s go a little faster,” she insists as the song reaches its midway point, her fingers picking ever more deftly at the banjo. “A little more!” Someone at the bar sends up a holler; the stomping gets louder.

Two days before the show, I sat in Veirs’ beautiful Northeast Portland backyard at dusk. “I can only play a few songs on banjo,” Veirs said. “But I can play the hell out of them.” Funk sat tuning his autoharp, still visibly uncoiling from the final recording session for an upcoming Decemberists’ album.

Funk said the LaurelThirst residency is a way for him to play music without the stress of promoting a new album. “I really miss that in my life a lot with touring so much. Just having a community and hanging out with people…[like] when I was 25 and playing in, like, 16 bands—just getting ripped every night. Those were the good old days,” he laughed.

“We both play in bands where we play the same songs over and over,” Veirs added over a bottle of Newcastle. “So it’s kind of nice to play old songs and internalize some of those ideas.” And the duo’s Two Beers songs—“Two Beers Veirs” was both Laura’s and her father’s college nickname—are folk traditionals, country ballads and barn-burners that both musicians can learn quickly, dig into, and play live without sheet music. Even as Veirs laughed through a forgotten lyric and Funk hit a note on the autoharp that made him cringe, “Wildwood Flower” sounded about perfect over the trembling leaves in Veirs’ backyard.

The more practiced LaurelThirst version sounds nearly as sweet, though it struggles against a conversation about the vice presidential debate at the back of the room. Near 8 pm, Veirs announces that the trio has two songs left, and it intends to “solo the hell out of them.” The first, “Wayfaring Stranger,” is a traditional that has been covered by every overalls-clad fiddler and pearl-toothed newgrass star. The Two Beers version, though—with Tornfelt’s violin sounding like two of them in perfect harmony and Veirs’ genuine, crystalline voice carrying the tune—gives it new life, while introducing the LaurelThirst tradition to a new audience. They also solo the hell out of it.