Why unamplified music makes for a better live show

The concert began suddenly, with a violinist standing amid the audience. Then came two male voices, clear and pure, also amid the crowd, singing notes rather than words.

And then, as the music paused, a third voice, belonging to the evening’s headliner, Brandi Carlile, separated itself to sing the first lyric:

“Broken sticks and broken bones/ Will turn to dust just like our bones …”

As Carlile’s voice, all by itself, rang through the main theater at the Old Town School of Folk Music and the band slowly made its way onto the stage, it was clear — in a way that no advance notice could have prepared you for — that this was a different sort of popular music concert.

There were no microphones on this Tuesday evening in October, no plugs for the instruments. Just 90 minutes of the unadorned warmth of stringed instruments and the human voice projecting into a room.

“We love to be a rock ‘n’ roll band … but we have a really deep passion for unamplified music and the rooms that can support it,” Carlile said at the start of the show, her second of two nights at the North Side theater. “It means more than I can say to have every seat full tonight and to (have you) check out our band.”

Carlile, 33, a highly regarded folk rocker out of Seattle, was on one of the final stops of what she named the “Pin Drop Tour.” From Portsmouth, N.H., to Chicago, it sold out every step of the way despite the fact that the very concept made almost everyone around her nervous.

“It was just a really hard sell on the administrative side of the industry,” she said from back home in Washington state after the tour was over. “It was difficult to convince anyone — promoters, agents, the record label — that touring like that would work.

“We were playing in rooms that don’t normally have concerts, sometimes. We were trying to convince promoters that we could be loud enough and that people wouldn’t walk out or want their money back. It was complicated.”

And just having the idea for it made Carlile herself nervous. “I’ve wanted to do it for 10 years, and the whole time I’ve been sort of secretly, arrogantly afraid that somebody would beat me to it,” she said. “And no one did.”

It was, in a sense, the concert I’ve been waiting for ever since I first heard a rock performer step in front of the mics to just sing to the room. That was Alejandro Escovedo, and it was probably the mid- to late 1990s, at Old Town’s old hall on Armitage Avenue.

It was just a song at the end of a set, but it was so pure, so intimate — and so different — that ever since I’ve had a standard and admittedly quixotic line about concerts: “I hate amplification.”

When you say this to people, they often misunderstand. It’s not electric versus acoustic instruments I’m talking about: MTV normal vs. MTV unplugged. It’s music delivered through a loudspeaker, amplified by electric power, versus music just delivered, amplified by the human body cavity or the hollow chamber behind the guitar strings. One of them is ordinary and one of them, in the right setting, is awesome.

“It’s easy to forget what instruments were built for, including the human instrument that is the voice, and how they were built to project,” Carlile said. “You get further and further away from it.”

And it’s not that I hate amplification. Listen to Ray Lamontagne or David Gray playing live through the audio system at Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion, and you’ll want to just melt into the lawn. But unamplification, in smaller rooms, done by somebody who can carry it off, seems so clearly superior to the average amped show: richer, deeper, more connected.

“I’ve always felt like the least equipment you can get away with, the more artist communication is going to come across,” said Bau Graves, executive director of the Old Town School, when I called him to talk about what makes music performed this way work. “The most affecting performances are the ones that have the least stuff in between the performer and the audience.”

Aficionados of the opera and symphony are probably scoffing right about now. The standard in those realms is no amplification. But those are fuller and, generally speaking, more highly trained sounds than we are used to hearing in pop and rock. And there is no novelty in a soprano singing “La Boheme” without a mic. It can be gorgeous in tone and warm in effect, of course, but it is also the norm.

Meanwhile, there is an amplification tradition in bluegrass music that is itself an engaging twist on the ordinary: All the players gather around one microphone and modulate their presence in the music by moving closer to or further from the mic.

But on nightclub stages, going without loudspeakers is almost unheard of. I’ve seen it maybe half a dozen times in almost three decades of going to shows around Chicago. And it’s always been just a one- or two-song treat, each time reinforcing my faith in the I-hate-amplification credo.

Carlile and her band — led by the backing vocalists, instrumentalists and songwriters, Tim and Phil Hanseroth — have made it a practice to do a song unamplified at concerts ever since she first discovered it could work.

“It all started out, it was 2005, maybe,” she said. “We were playing in New Jersey, opening for Chris Isaak, totally busted, flat broke. Everything of ours had been stolen in New York City. We had no clothes. It was kind of a nightmare. But on this particular evening, we were playing in a really cool old theater, and we only had, like, 30 minutes. It was really important. We were going to put this kick-ass show on, sell a bunch of our unplugged demos — to go buy new clothes, yeah, which we actually did.

“But the PA cut out in the second song. We were standing there for about 31/2 minutes while they tried to fix it. Eventually we thought of, like, a really loud song that we knew (‘Over You’) and stepped to the front of the stage and played this song, and we were totally stunned that it worked and that people could hear it. Ever since then we’ve been doing one song like that a night.”

Why does this approach work? Certainly, there’s something fundamental and deeply rooted about simply hearing the human voice in the air, going back to songs around a campfire or on a front porch. There’s the novelty of it: Live music presentation is pretty hidebound, and part of that hide involves using speakers. And then there’s the democratizing effect.

“It’s like this great equalizer between us and the audience,” Carlile said. “It takes us off the stage and puts us in the room. We’re not hiding behind microphones and affectation. It’s harder to feel cool, so you end up feeling more vulnerable. And it does away with the superiority complex that is that 3-foot elevation between the stage and the audience. It totally does away with it and makes it a communal thing.”

Carlile said that, a little surprisingly, she felt her voice get stronger as the tour progressed, comparing the “Pin Drop Tour” to a full workout with weights versus a normal concert being more like a set of pushups.

Even at only 10 dates the first time out, the tour was expensive to put on, she added, because the band did advance scouting of halls and built special percussion instruments.

But Carlile said she’d like to continue doing wholly unamplified shows

“I want to try bigger rooms,” she said. “I think we could do it. I do. There are places that hold 2,000 people where we could kill a ‘Pin Drop’ night, but then there are rooms that hold 150 people where it would just die.”

The Gary and Laura Maurer Concert Hall at Old Town, the main stage, was designed to handle precisely what Carlile and her band threw at it, said the room’s acoustic designer, Rick Talaske, principal acoustic consultant with Talaske Sound Thinking.

“When we developed the room we created an environment that was neutral in its timbre,” said Talaske, best known locally for the sound design at Pritzker. “The intent was to avoid emphasis of select pitches of sounds. So that is a condition that works well for both amplified and unamplified music.”

In developing the hall, he said, “We were a little surprised and chagrined when we heard from Old Town artistic staff that virtually all events are amplified. We thought folk music would be lovely unamplified in many cases.”

Carlile’s show created huge buzz among the Old Town community, said Graves:

“I did not see it, but I sure did hear about it. I heard it was really spectacular the way she used the room. People thought that it was really gutsy to come into our room and play without a microphone. It’s an unusual thing for people to see, here or anywhere else. It may have startled a few people, in a pleasant way.”

The intimacy of it was almost overwhelming. That’s also an adjective you could use for the crowd’s response. I’ve heard big, enthusiastic applause for songs many times before; what followed each of her tunes that night had a different quality, a level of appreciation for Carlile’s pluck and a warmth toward her for providing this aural delight that verged on the ecstatic.

“Thank you so much!” someone shouted after that first song, “Again Today,” from her T Bone Burnett-produced 2007 album, “The Story.”

There were kudos, too, of course, on Twitter. One of them came from actress Wrenn Schmidt (“The Americans,” “Person of Interest”), who had caught the tour in New York.

“Epic, gorgeous, holy and euphoric,” she wrote.

Yes, between that and the loud “thank you” — and a heartfelt wish that other performers will venture something similar — that’s about right.

sajohnson@tribpub.com

Twitter @StevenKJohnson