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I went to see Mimicking Birds frontman Nate Lacy at Al's Den the other night (he's there every night at 7 pm until this Saturday—highly recommended) and I was struck by how much maturing he has done in the year since I last caught him with his band. Alone on the new basement club's dim-lit stage with just his two guitars, a microphone and a half-finished beer, he rarely stopped to speak to the 20 or so folks in attendance, but he didn't need to. Lacy's songs are deep conversations—the kind you share with good friends while staring up at the open sky; the kind you have when you're high, because when you're not high it's all a bit too much to think about and besides, having these conversations makes you sound like you're high.
Those big, scary thoughts—about the nature of consciousness and the universe and time—make their way into Lacy's music. He's at peace with this kind of thinking: One assumes this is why the guy is so quiet and why a song about the sun turning into a black hole—one of the many images painted on this brand new full-band demo track, "Wormholes"—can sound so personal. Having ingested and internalized his questions to the universe, Lacy is able to spit them back out as calm and meditative compositions that talk about ever-expanding "nothingness" just as easily and romantically as they talk about the pain of growing up.
As mature as Lacy has become with his peculiar songwriting niche, he seems even more confident with playing them in person. From his inspired vocal delivery to his circular guitar plucking and occasional knob-twiddling, Lacy seems to have it all figured out. On Monday, as the lanky young songwriter crafted a layered introduction to "Burning Stars," I noticed that the smattering of pedals at his feet had what looked like little sails sticking up from them. Upon closer inspection, Lacy had twisted wires around the most frequently used knobs on his pedals and wrapped tape around the excess wire that ran skyward so that he could nudge them with the toe of his shoe when he wanted reverb on his vocals or subtle distortion in his guitar tone. I'm not sure that Lacy pioneered this technique, but the homemade quality of the modifications seemed, to me, to be indicative of the way he makes his music: Mimicking Birds' meticulously detailed songs often sound like Lacy's attempts to recreate his dreams from the night before. And it's nice, it turns out, to live in someone else's dream for awhile.
SEE IT: Nate Lacy plays Al's Den at the Crystal Hotel tonight, tomorrow night and Saturday night at 7 pm. It's free and it's very good. 21+.
WWeek 2015