Touring 9 cities partly in support of his new EP, Colin Meloy Sings Trad. Arr. Shirley Collins, partly out of restlessness, Colin Meloy performed marvelously Saturday night in Los Angeles. Any fan of the Decemberists’ song-writing should be buying tickets for his future performances, if they haven’t got them already.

Laura Veirs opened the show sounding like the cross between Joanna Newsom and a guitar. Some complain that she utilized a prerecorded drum track, but I felt her excellent employ of a looping pedal, looping both guitar and voice, the better to harmonize with herself on stage. Most of her set was culled from her latest release Year Of Meteors (Nonesuch, 2005).

I was interested to notice that for Colin’s set, he employed not only a table for his drink, but a table cloth(blood red) and a kind of tone setting collection of gewgaws and curios(I think that’s the term). Colin introduced us to Cheryl, the Skull, The Ship Maya Angelou, and a third item introduced for the fourth show on his tour, a toy sheep. He asked for names, throwing away both softies (Sebastian) and rougher ones (Ché). Eventually he settled on ‘Erik With A K’ (or however you want to spell it, it’s the pronunciation that matters). This simple rapport with the audience set quite an intimate, yet cheery tone for the evening, and he made it clear he didn’t mind us all singing along. All that was missing was a fireplace and a high-backed leather chair. A friend who had attended his San Francisco told me that many of the jokes colin used were the same at the other show, confirming my impression of Colin Meloy as an artist who puts on a show, not just plays some songs. Coming finally around to a kind of Campfire setting in his encore, Colin asked everyone to close their eyes and imagine we were all sitting around a campfire in the Colorado wilderness as he described the sites and sounds and then launched into ‘The Bandit Queen’ with campfire style.