Tonight we welcome back old friend Bill Morrissey — singer, songwriter, author. In 2007, Bill released Come Running, his tenth album. Kelly Flint, long time vocalist for cult faves Dave’s True Story, who has recently released a solo album, Drive all Night, opens.

Bill Morrissey has created as impressive a body of work as any songwriter today, a collection of finely-honed songs that match his economy of lyric and melody with a writer’s gift for storytelling. His empathetic knack for capturing the harshness and small sadness of the characters in his songs is tempered by his wry sense of humor, such that many of his songs leave the listener with a smile. Over the course of his long career, two of Bill Morrissey’s ten albums have received Grammy nominations and several have earned 4-star reviews in Rolling Stone as well as equal accolades in nearly every other major national publication. Stephen Holden, for The New York Times, wrote, “Mr. Morrissey’s songs have the force of poetry . . . a terseness, precision of detail and a tone of laconic understatement that relate his lyrics to the fiction of writers like Raymond Carver and Richard Ford.” It is not surprising that he is also the author of the novel Edson and the recently completed Imaginary Runner.

On stage, Bill mixes the seriousness and urgency of his songs with a wry, acerbic wit. His often improvised deadpan monologues and introductions provide a perfect balance to his live shows. Cutting his teeth on the American country blues of Mississippi John Hurt and Robert Johnson, the pure country of Hank Williams, the Kansas City of Count Basie and Lester Young, and, of course, the New York folk songwriters of the 1960s, Bill digested all this great diversity and found his own unique voice. Who better to help the me&thee celebrate its 39th birthday than Bill Morrissey?

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Postmodern folk with a tinge of Americana is a catchphrase description of Kelly Flint. As the sultry voice for the trenchant songs of David Cantor in New York City-based Dave’s True Story, Kelly made five albums and was the toast of The New York Times, the Kennedy Center, and more. But now it’s time for her to spread her solo wings, or more appropriately, to Drive All Night. That’s the title of Flint’s first solo album, and what that album’s about is the sum total of the places she has been. In the album’s warm, organic arrangements, acoustic sonorities, and occasional open-road, real-America flavor, you can discern Flint’s Midwestern youth, spent soaking up the classic folk-rockers of the ’70s. The songs are built around her acoustic guitar and the arrangements, whether hushed or assertive, are all hewn with a dark urgency. The result is music that is folky in texture only. Kelly has also hosted the Upstairs Sessions at The Living Room in NYC on the third Tuesday of the month for quite some time. Upstairs Sessions features performances interwoven with talk and she has had many me&thee performers as guests.

But nothing animates the music so much as Morrissey’s keen eye for detail and ear for the telling phrase. And, of course, there’s that voice. When Morrissey wraps his quivering, whiskey-burnished croak around a line, it feels as warm as the first breath of spring. Highly recommended. Steve Boisson, Acoustic guitar

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Still a hipster, still a darling of the insider, now that [Kelly Flint] has widened the lens, perhaps there will be more insiders digging what she can do with a song and how much of a classic femme fatale she is without the obvious chanteuse or cabaret trappings. A killer set that marks an overdue, auspicious solo debut sure to keep you reaching for this when you need something that hits a homer for you. MIDWEST RECORD RECAP