Identity crisis?

Ferron tries out some selves at the Paradise

by Michael Freedberg

There was a slightly sad look on the face of Ferron as she reached the midpoint of her set last Saturday at the Paradise. "I want to thank you for inviting me to come back to Boston," she said to her 300 faithful fans, on hand to hear 16 years' worth of Ferron's complex songs about uncertainty and learning things. It had indeed been a long time, almost a decade. Older now, but remembering her girlish beginnings, she reflected on being, at high school, "the girl in the corner strumming a guitar while the rest of the class necked. Later I learned why."

When a cult artist returns to perform for her cult after a long absence, there is certain to be some melancholy mixed in with the celebration. But Ferron's set was almost uniformly melancholy. Quietly she sang "Girl on the Road," a song about always having to leave those you're just getting to know; slowly she monologued "The Chosen Ones," the unrequited-secret-passion song that introduces Still Riot (Warner Bros.), her new CD. She almost cried "Harmless Love," a mellow assertion of emotional necessity. Amid the realizations of lost loves and "things learned too late" (her phrase) there were parentheses of comedy -- her chiseled, masculine, Lyle Lovett-like features collapsing to weird, gamine grinning -- but every joke about undergoing therapy and questioning your acceptance of self absorbed its dose of tears.

Tears and "too late" are staples of country music, and Ferron, whose "Daddy," she said, "was a truck driver and Mom a waitress," could certainly relate the sighs of "Girl on the Road" and the crawling rhythm of "Ain't Life a Brook" to an Aaron Tippin/Suzy Bogguss audience. But Ferron at the Paradise insisted on difficult lyrics about plain-faced paradox untreated with fancy wordplay. She was a difficult read and said so. She also shifted roles, from country-bred tune picker to passionate sorceress. In a sultry reading voice she vamped, Dietrich-like, over lush Europop like "I Am Hungry" and "Indian Dreams," sounding like a diva (and in her svelte black suit and art-deco tie she certainly looked like one). But her music changed role again, and character, as she sang the gospel tunes "Easy on Love" and "Still Riot" in a bright, slim soprano. Her shifts of voice and changes of venue did nothing to convey the Paradise audience smoothly from one perspective to another. She seemed to be trying out various selves, liking none. Uneasy was the theme. As if she were expecting her songs not to be accepted and her numerous selves not to last, much less be invited back.