For the majority of the concertgoers who trickled into the Graduate Center Lounge Saturday night, Andrew Rose Gregory was nothing more than a songwriter with a thoughtful bluegrass repertoire and a smooth, Appalachian baritone. But his leonine mane of unkempt dirty-blonde hair and scruffy whiskers mask his alter ego — he is one-fourth of the pop culture powerhouse the Gregory Brothers, the family behind Auto-Tune the News, the Bed Intruder Song and the Double Rainbow Song.
It is hard not to notice that Gregory is a genuinely nice guy. While most of his songs lie definitively on the blue side of the blues, his concert banter abounded with playful and mildly self-mocking humor.
Gregory paid tribute to Jack Hardy, a renowned folk musician who passed away in March. Hardy, who ran a songwriters' circle in Greenwich Village to which Gregory belonged, was the father of Saturday's concert organizer Morgan Hardy GS. Gregory eulogized him with the song "White Shoes," a soulful melody that he described as "the most kick-butt-est song" he had ever heard Hardy play.
Gregory's setlist also included two tracks from his new album, "Song of Songs," which sets the biblical text of Solomon's Song of Songs to contemporary orchestration. This record, notable for its big-band sound, blue-eyed soul texture and input from Sufjan Stevens, represents a marked departure from Gregory's previous rough-around-the-edges work.
"It's full of flugelhorns and flutes," Gregory said during the concert. This is not an understatement. Taken individually, each song is a brazen hymn polished to an arresting shine. Heard one after another, the songs merge into a treacley cacophony of brass virtuoso. Stevens' influence is perhaps too strongly felt, especially on "Let Me See You Now," which could have been lifted straight from Stevens' debut album, "Illinoise."
Gregory was wise to stick largely to his previous works Saturday — the performance was more intimate for it. While the artistic vision of his "Song of Songs" is undoubtedly the grander, his earlier albums have the advantage of more immediate accessibility.
"He's genuine and simultaneously doesn't take himself too seriously," said concertgoer Alexei Abrahams GS. "Those are rare qualities to have in combination. I felt like I was at a campfire in West Virginia."
