Last Monday I took T to a concert for her birthday. So the gift was over a month after her actual birthday. Timing was never my strong suit.

Dar Williams, Shawn Colvin, Mary Chapin-Carpenter and Patty Griffin all shared the stage, and it was amazing. If you enjoy female neo-folky-singer-songwriters, there was a whole lot of talent up there on the stage. If you don't enjoy such things then you'd probably better stop reading and go search the internet for hotel-heiress video footage. This was their last of 30-something shows, having been on the road since September.

The only two of the four that I really knew about were Dar and Shawn. I'd heard of, and been recommended to the others, but had never gotten around to them, thinking that Patty was too country, or that Mary Chapin-Carpenter had too many syllables for me to refer to her on any kind of regular basis. Dar of course was adorable and incidentally, knocked up, which was a surprise to me. I truly enjoyed her performance, mostly because it seemed she was pressured to sing, instead of doing her breathy, cute voice that carries her through most shows targeted at her fan base. Shawn was perfect. It turns out that listening to her live is a little like hearing a studio recording, in a good way. Every intonation, every note, every word was spot-on perfect. She is a polished performer, and I personally love her guitar style. Mary, or as the others referred to her, "Chapin," was genuine and confident and put up some of the most intricate finger picking of the evening. The only problem I have now is that she has too many albums for me to go out and comfortably buy at once. I'll likely need advice before starting on that venture. Patty was a surprise to me. She's a tiny red headed woman, plays a huge guitar, and has the sweetest voice imaginable, when she's holding back. On some songs, however, her voice is a weapon, filling the theatre with a power you wouldn't have thought possible.

They played requests from each other mostly. The sequence went: Chapin, Patty, Shawn and finally Dar. They played each other's songs, their own songs, harmonized with each other, and spent a whole lot of time talking about each song before playing it, which is one of the things I love most about folk music. Chapin called it a "guitar pull," but I mostly thought it was three hours of amazing music.

Since it was the last show, they were relaxed and in good spirits. Dar was actually putting on makeup for some period of time, and Shawn kept using some "Mr. T" keychain to tell us things like,"Quit yo' jibba-jabber!" Of course there was some hugging and gooey girl-love at the end, but it was well worth it, if only for the encore. They came back out, and sat down with a vaguely familiar and very catchy guitar riff. The song went like this:

You are my fire
My one desire

And they went on to sing the whole I Want It That Way masterpiece, which must have been a little difficult with all of us laughing our heads off. It was beautiful.