JAY LUSTIG
Dayna Kurtz performs at Fletcher’s Listening Room in Montclair, Oct. 11.
Dayna Kurtz performed her aching cover of Johnny Adams’ “Reconsider Me” at Fletcher’s Listening Room in Montclair, Oct. 11, after a member of the audience requested it. But before doing so, she made an observation.
“I have noticed that every time I ask for suggestions from the audience, everybody asks for my saddest shit,” she said.
Kurtz, a New Jersey native who now lives in New Orleans — and who has been active on the singer-songwriter circuit since the ’90s — is indeed a master of the big, mournful ballad. But there was much more than that to this concert. (She will be back in the area Nov. 10, for a show at Barbès in Brooklyn). Included in the setlist, for instance, was the playful “Raise the Last Glass,” which she described as “a drinking song for the apocalypse”; the raunchy, Mamie Minch-written “Razorburn Blues”; and “What Did Jesus Say?,” in which she takes issue with Christian orthrodoxy on subjects like abortion and trans rights by looking at the text of the Bible itself.
Kurtz got political on two songs: the anthem of defiance “Don’t Tread on Me” and “It’ll Never Happen Here,” which seemed like a boozy cabaret sing-along (even though she was performing it in an alcohol-free coffeehouse) as she performed it a cappella, reading the words off a piece of paper and making up the melody on the spot. She said she wrote the lyrics about “the situation” — meaning the United States’ current political situation — in 2018, but felt that it was too over the top, at the time. But when she pulled out the lyrics a week before this show, she said, it seemed “on the money.”
The song expresses the hope many of us had in President Trump’s first term, that things wouldn’t get too bad. And it works in 2025 because we can now see how foolish those hopes were. “There’s smart people around him, at least two or three/It’ll be controlled by the powers that be/It’s not good for business, at some point they’ll see/It’ll never happen here,” Kurtz sang, in one of the verses.
JAY LUSTIG
Dayna Kurtz and Robert Maché at Fletcher’s Listening Room.
Kurtz was deftly accompanied throughout the show by Robert Maché, on guitar, mandolin and backing vocals. (Maché and Kurtz have also co-founded a rowdy blues-rock band, Lulu & the Broadsides, that performs mostly in New Orleans.) While Kurtz spoke a fair amount between songs, Mache just added a pithy comment here or there, as when he said he was going to have the last lines of Kurtz’s song “Fred Astaire” written on his gravestone.
The last verse goes:
What do you remember
After too much sweet wine
That you woke up hung-over
Or that you had a good time?
Well, I had a good time
Kurtz mentioned that she wrote this song while living in Paterson (indeed, it has a line about that city’s Mill Street in it). She also said that the album it is on, her 2002 studio debut Postcards From Downtown, has been remixed and will soon be reissued on vinyl, with another song elongated in order to include more of the backing vocals that Richie Havens recorded for it.
She opened the show with “Invocation,” a song in which she asks to be inspired by the Muse. And she closed it “You’ll Always Live Inside of Me” (co-written by Bobby Charles and David Allan Coe), which felt like a benediction. Other highlights included the dream-like (and, actually, dream-inspired) “Venezuela”; and poetic love songs like “Love Gets in the Way” and “It’s How You Hold Me.”
Kurtz also plugged her Patreon account and said that, given the state of the music industry these days, it is basically “keeping my ass alive right now.” She added: “I very strongly urge you to look up other independent artists, and writers, and poets, and cartoonists that you love. … The digital economy is kind of kicking all of our asses.”
Over the past 30 years or so, Kurtz has amassed a rich and varied catalog of songs, and it was great to have an opportunity to see her in an intimate, 125-capacity space like Fletcher’s Listening Room, which launched in the summer of 2024 and has presented occasional concerts since then. (Four are now scheduled for the first five months of 2026.)
Here is the show’s setlist and, below it, a video of Kurtz and Maché at their 2024 concert at Fletcher’s Listening Room.
“Invocation”
“Raise the Last Glass”
“Razorburn Blues”
“Fred Astaire”
“Don’t Tread on Me”
“How Do I Stop”
“A Grade”
“Reconsider Me”
“Venezuela”
“What Did Jesus Say?”
“Parlez-moi d’amour”
“It’ll Never Happen Here”
“Love Gets in the Way”
“It’s How You Hold Me”
Encore
“The Hole”
“You’ll Always Live Inside of Me”
Dayna Kurtz will perform at Barbès in Brooklyn, Nov. 10 at 7 p.m. Visit barbesbrooklyn.com/events. For more about her, visit daynakurtz.com.
Upcoming shows at Fletcher’s Listening Room at The Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Montclair will include Sophia Ramos & Sean Harkness, Jan. 23; Scott E. Moore, Feb. 14; Ballynafeigh Balladeers, March 13; and Aurora Nealand, May 15. Visit uumontclair.org/listeningroom.
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