Spy Review:  Zackary Lucky Brings His Sad, Powerful Songs to the Stoltz

You know it’s going to be an evening of sad songs when the first words out of the artists’ mouth, even before “hello,” are “Hang Me, Hang me/I’ll be dead and gone.”  

That is how Saskatchewan-born, Canadian singer-songwriter Zackary Lucky greeted the audience at the Avalon Theare’s Stoltz Listening Room Thursday night. But Lucky’s penchant for sad songs was a stark contrast with his charming and friendly stage presence.

Lucky’s songs are not complicated; they are straight-forward, powerful depictions of his life, a life lived primarily on the road. Many, if not most, of the songs he shared with the appreciative audience at Stolz were about the ups and downs – mostly the downs – of being away from home.  As he sang in Stoned, one of the standout songs in a strong set, “Leaving comes easy to someone like me/not that I want to/just comes naturally. The hotels on the side of the road/the highway sets me free.”  Finding himself caught between the call of the road and a more settled life and home, Lucky sings, in the plaintive Wild Rose County, “In Wild Rose county/I hear your voice on the phone/saying you missed me/and were tired of being alone/But it ain’t easy/living out here on my own/stuck in Wild Rose county/with no way to go home.”

Lucky’s voice is perfect for these songs – full and rich, with just a touch of honey. He is not shy about revealing his influences, sharing two Townes Van Zandt covers (as if Lucky’s own songs were not sad enough!), name dropping Guy Clark and Hayes Carll, and preforming songs written by fellow Canadians (including the great Water in the Fuel by Fred Eaglesmith). Van Zandt is most direct, if inexact, influence.  Imagine Van Zant without the omnipresent sense of existential dread and you will have a good approximation of Lucky’s songwriting.

There is a palpable, and lovely, sense of place to Lucky’s songs. He is from Saskatchewan like Bob Seeger is from Michigan, like Lucinda Willaims is from Louisiana, and like Bruce Springsteen is from the Jersey Shore. It shapes every aspect of his work. It is hard to imagine two places more different than the landlocked prairies of Saskatchewan and the Chesapeake Bay-focused town of Easton.  What they have in common, Lucky made clear, are the challenges of finding happiness amid difficulty and staying true to oneself.

Lucky was accompanied by Miles Zurawell on the dobro, a wood-bodied guitar with a metal resonator cone rather than the more traditional open sound hole of an acoustic guitar. The dobro’s sound is strange; not “strange” as in “bad,” but rather “strange” as in “unfamiliar.”  It has a distinctive, ethereal quality, and is typically used quite sparingly. With just Lucky and Zurawell on stage, the dobro was front and center, with Zurawell coxing sounds from it that were beautiful and haunting at the same time. Zurawell’s turn in the spotlight was a highlight of the concert. He shared an instrumental from his own recent album – Elk River Blues, an old West Virginia fiddle tune by Ernie Carpenter reworked for the dobro. With no need for words, Zurawell captured the sadness and sorrow behind Carpenter’s song, which was inspired by the drowning of his ancestral homelands along the Elk River by a dam built by the Army Corps of Engineers. 

Lucky’s show in Easton came toward the end of a 35-date, coast-to-coast tour, which saw him playing in many places he had never visited before. Not only was this his first time in Easton, but Lucky had also never been to Maryland before. You can almost see the gears turning in his head as he begins to process all that he has seen and learned on this tour and to translate those experiences into songs. I can’t wait to hear them.