At first glance, and even more at first hearing, this acoustic folk-ish duo might make you think of Gillian Welch ("a two-person band named Gillian Welch," according to Gillian Welch the person). And you would be quite right. The comparison is apt and, more importantly, not an over-reach. I'm pretty much in love with this song, the first track on the most recent of their three albums.

They are a husband-and-wife team, Pete and Crystal Damore. The Louisiana-looking setting of the video is not a pose, as they live there, and Crystal at least is from there. Their work is very rooted in place and people. You can read more about them and hear more music at their web site. They write and sing--I think she is the major songwriting voice, at least lyrically, and obviously the vocal center--about the things which seem ordinary but have profound significance. That sort of thing is often and fairly said of various songwriters and poets, but some do it much more powerfully than others. 

"We always tell people we named ourselves Ordinary Elephant because there’s no such thing as an ordinary elephant." And the implication is that everything is an elephant--nothing is really ordinary if you look at it right.

I heard them Saturday night, at the suggestion and in the company of my friend Stu, in a very small venue called The People's Room of Mobile. And it was great: a very small audience--I wish for the sake of the owner and the performers that it been somewhat larger--crystal-clear sound at a nice listenable volume, beautiful music from gifted artists with no show-biz airs or gimmicks, just great music and almost intimate talk about the music and the experiences behind it. There were several songs in the set that struck me, on a single hearing, as on a par with "Once Upon A Time," which I had listened to online a few times before the show.

Normally I experience a slight revulsion for anything called "The People's...." It has associations ranging from the ridiculous, as in the once-famous People's Park in Berkeley CA, to the evil, as in People's Republic of China. Apparently The People's Room was originally called The Listening Room, but was threatened with lawsuit by a Nashville place with the same name. Or so I read somewhere a day or two ago, though I can't find the link now.

But I detected no sign at all that the owner has totalitarian ambitions, unless you count the fact that he's pretty adamant that the place is a listening room. Not a drinking or eating or talking or dancing or looking at your phone room, though they will provide you with a beer or a Coke or a bottle of water. Wine, too, maybe?

I even bought a t-shirt.

Thanks to Stu for the photo. 

I'm not a great fan of the banjo, especially of the frantic bluegrass style, but I like the way Pete uses it, playing mostly single-note lines that made a nice bright contrast to Crystal's mellow guitar. He also plays an instrument that looks like a small arch-top guitar with eight strings, doubled as in a mandolin, which he says is called an octave mandolin.