A few songs into Lera Lynn’s show at South on Main Thursday night, my wife Karen leaned over to me and said, “She might have done herself a disservice by being on that show.”
That show, as almost anyone who knows anything about Lynn must know, was the second season of HBO’s True Detective in which Lynn played — in the words of Jonathan Portis, as relayed by a mutual friend — “the saddest singer in the saddest bar in the world.” And yes, if all you knew of Lynn was that lank-haired troubadour, slowly stroking languorous barre chords while bad men consulted in the foreground, you would have been completely unprepared for the dynamic, torchy and elegantly realized post-Americana showcase Lynn and her band — guitarist, bassist and drummer — performed.
While the crowd seemed largely unfamiliar with her material, which included only one tune from her True Detective residency — “My Least Favorite Life,” co-written with Rosanne Cash and T Bone Burnett — Lynn charmed and beguiled them with a smoky, sultry set of mostly minor-key originals including “Standing on the Moon,” “Out to Sea” and “Coming Down” from her 2014 album The Avenues.
Performed live, with necessarily lean and efficient arrangements, the songs took on a dynamic that seemed absent on the recorded version. Any singer-songwriter performing in a band context risks being marginalized as “just the singer,” and the rack of guitars awaiting the band onstage seemed to suggest that perhaps Lynn would be reduced to strumming her vintage acoustic (a beautiful old, cracked lacquer Kay) while the boys did the heavy lifting behind her.
But a couple of songs in, she doffed her jacket and slid on a Fender Mustang to lead the band through a ringing cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Fire.” Later she switched to a Guild hollow body electric for some baritone runs. While Lynn wasn’t exactly the lead guitarist — her longtime collaborator Ben Lewis produced some amazingly tasteful fills from a three-pickup Danelectro (he picked up a Gibson Melody Maker for the encore) — she was an integral part of the mix, providing skeletal figures that colored and sparked, little meteors flaring through a dark sonic atmosphere. Her playing was tart and sharp, reminiscent of Chrissie Hynde’s fretwork, albeit in a countrified context.
With a voice that recalls a young Rosanne Cash, less weathered but with a ghostly edge that shimmers somewhere between Patsy Cline’s bel canto and Alanis Morissette’s vernacular whine, Lynn is a major talent waiting to be discovered. A little more familiarity with the material on the audience’s part and she would have brought down the house.