Cool Thing Tonight: Cameron Dezen Hammon Releases a New Album Over at St. Mark’s

Tonight — Wednesday, February 28th — is a bit of a quiet night, music-wise, around here, but there is a show this evening that sounds very, very cool, at least to me.

You might recall a while back when local singer/songwriter Cameron Dezen Hammon put out an album of covers, Words Don’t Bleed. It’s pretty damn special, with Dezen Hammon reinventing/reinterpreting excellent tunes songs by Springsteen, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Don Henley, & George Michael, among others, and it turns out the experience of making it only made Dezen Hammon want to do more.

So she did, crowdfunding another release, this one a live album of country/gospel/soul standards that’s about as far from Words Don’t Bleed as you can get while having the same person singing. This time out, she decided to do songs by Patsy Cline (the classic tunes “Walking After Midnight” and “I Fall to Pieces”), Odetta (“Motherless Child”), George Gershwin (“Summertime”), Leonard Cohen (“Hallelujah”), Patty Griffin (“Heavenly Day”), Emmylou Harris (“All My Tears”), Woody Guthrie (“This Land Is Your Land”), and Dolly Parton (“It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels”), along with a handful of gospel staples (“His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” “A Closer Walk with Thee,” “How Great Tho Art”) and a reworked version of Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire,” which she did for Words, and she decided to perform ’em all live at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, just over in Bellaire.

The result is Live at St. Mark’s, and like the album that preceded it, what I’ve heard so far is also pretty damn special. That said, this one is a very, very different beast — the live setting makes it feel more organic and natural than Words, while I still love that album, and yet it all sounds pretty close to perfect. The musicianship is stellar, and Dezen Hammon’s voice, as always, is gorgeous, riding the line between Patsy’s warm melancholy and haunting, clear-as-a-bell gospel vocals. It’s intimate and up-close-sounding, like a private concert just for you right in your headphones (or car speakers, or wherever).

Which brings me to tonight, where you can actually attend a private concert just for you (um, ish), at the aforementioned St. Mark’s. Dezen Hammon will be performing songs from Live at St. Mark’s at the venue itself this evening, starting at 7:30PM, to celebrate the album’s release.

It sounds like this may be the last show Dezen Hammon does for a little while, and hey, it’s free, which should be two more reasons to get your ass out there and go. Do it.