FOR all intents and purposes Liz Stringer could have been playing in her lounge room to a group of her closest friends.
Stringer has always been a warm and engaging performer. She's never been hung up with creative pretension.
The stories she spins are lived experiences - which many of us can relate to - that feel firmly rooted in Australia, despite her latest album having been recorded in Canada.
More than a year on from the release of her AIR Award-winning album, First Time Really Feeling, Stringer took a brief break from supporting Midnight Oil on their global tour to perform at Hamilton's The Gal.
The chair and table lay-out created a literal divide between Stringer's five-piece band and the audience, but her music and personality overcame the distance.
The 14-song set leaned heavily on First Time Really Feeling, undoubtedly Stringer's best work in her six studio album career.
The album was recorded in 2018 in Toronto, which Stringer said felt like another time, before COVID, masks and lockdowns.
"It turns out sitting in your room in Melbourne doesn't preserve you," Stringer said.
Dashville's colourful MC Ben Quinn was in the audience and Stringer dedicated Keep Keeping On to "the hype man."
Another highlight was the folksy Australiana of High Open Hills, one of the oldest songs on the night from Stringer's 2012 album Warm In The Darkness.
The imagery and story-telling of "I met him high on a hill when I was sixteen/ And my breath it was taken by the cold August wind," was as vivid as anything Paul Kelly has produced.
Stringer's songwriting rewards fans who listen intently to lyrics. There's the brutal realism of Dangerous with, "The force of a fire front was raging in you/ We f--ked like we fought, ripped the flesh from the sinew/ No greater fever between any two."
Elsewhere on The Waning Of The Sun there were poetic lines Samuel Taylor Coleridge would be proud of in, "Strange light, evensong, river gums paint on the glassy Murray/ We've been smoking and the silty dust straps our feet, bare as a baby."
Stringer has endured and won a well-publicised battle with sobriety and there's no greater statement from that period than the show-stopping track, The Metrologist.
It was revealed the song's conception began at Maitland's Grand Junction Hotel and it's intense recital generated one of the biggest reactions of the night.
In the encore Stringer delivered a solo acoustic version of It's A Long Way Down about her hard-drinking days.
The chorus of, "so if you go, would you take me with you?" was met with an emphatic "yes" from the audience.
It was that kind of night. The audience and Stringer felt like old friends.
The type you see every couple of years and instantly connect with, without skipping a beat.
