Review: John Craigie at Freo.Social

John Craigie at Freo.Social
w/ Kassi Valazza
Sunday, March 6, 2025

There are troubadours and there are troubadours—then there’s John Craigie. With stories as hilarious, enchanting, and perceptively poignant as his songs, a Craigie concert is as much an experience as it is a performance. And his Sunday night show at Freo.Social was no exception. Engaging, almost to a fault, Craigie charmed his way through an eclectic 90-minute set that drew upon songs and stories from his 20 years on the road.

This was the Portland-based singer-songwriter’s first visit to Western Australia, and for his two west coast shows (Craigie performed at Lyric’s Underground in Maylands the preceding night), he was joined by erstwhile Arizonan, current New Orleans resident, and fellow traveller in song, Kassi Valazza. Having met Craigie while living and playing in Portland, Valazza threw forth an inflicting set of introspective yet insightful acoustic ballads that pertinently embraced Craigie’s northwestern philosophy of ‘without rain you don’t get roses.’

Kassi Valazza opened her set with a contemplatively stirring rendition of Michael Hurley’s quirky Light Green Fellow. Hurley, the acclaimed godfather of ‘freak folk,’ passed away last week shortly after returning home to Oregon from a festival in Knoxville, Tennessee. Charged with empathy and guided by nuance, Valazza’s performance of Hurley’s beautifully eccentric song was not only sublime but also opened the door for the remainder of the set to follow suit.

In moving on to her own material, Room in the City and Rapture from her 2023 album, Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing, were first up. In navigating the intersecting highways of love and life, Valazza ventured back to 2019 with Johnny Dear from the album Dear Dead Days. Injecting her performance with a poetic grace, two further songs from Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing, Canyon Lines and Song For A Season, were equally inspiring, as were the enticing Roll On and Weight Of The Wheel from Valazza’s forthcoming album, From Newman Street, which is scheduled for release next month.

As Valazza unplugged her guitar, she turned the stage over to John Craigie. And, as wistfully insightful as Kassi Valazza’s songs were, Craigie’s more waggish contributions soon matched his colleague’s in terms of heartfelt contemplation.

Opening with Which Phase Is This?, a song that worked its way onto Craigie’s 2016 album, Capricorn In Retrograde… Just Kidding… Live in Portland—which brought him to the attention of Jack Johnson and subsequently onto the Hawaiian singer-songwriter’s summer tour—Craigie wasted no time in defining the temperament of the night. Insightful, funny, and completely relatable, Which Phase Is This? was coloured with chiming acoustics and blasts of harmonica. The song encapsulated everything that makes Craigie one of the most enchanting performers currently navigating the highways and backroads of folk-infused Americana music.

As Craigie closed out the song with one last guitar strum, he bowed his head and turned away from the microphone, seemingly to gather his thoughts. Now coddling his guitar, he returned to the microphone and declared, “This is not my first time playing in this region,” pausing for a moment before adding with a smirk, “I played Perth last night.” With that, the Portlandian launched into Virgin Guitar from his 2017 album, No Rain, No Rose. The first album Craigie wrote and recorded after relocating to Oregon, the record is a beacon to the power of new beginnings, with Virgin Guitar offering a sublimely considered case in point.

After recounting a hilarious interaction with Wesley Schultz from The Lumineers about kelp, Craigie masterfully redirected the mood by delving into Helena, a dark and brooding tale of enflamed revenge from his album Mermaid Salt, before returning to No Rain, No Rose for the toe-tapping shuffle of Rough Johns. Craigie then delivered another unconventional tale of love, this time involving an unlikely couple’s escape to Resurrection Bay in Alaska. A song that straddles a narrative terrain somewhere between Willy Vlautin and Jason Isbell, Resurrection Bay served as a poignant counterpoint to Craigie’s more Todd Snider-styled musings of songs like Which Phase Is This? and Laurie Rolled Me a J.

Craigie then brought the media into the conversation. With a past punctuated by relentlessly performing in coffee shops and house concerts across North America, Craigie explained how he’s often asked by interviewers about the worst gig he’s played. After recalling an early performance in Boise, Idaho, where he was chased naked through the streets by the owner of a ‘borrowed’ hot tub, Craigie recounted the story of a house concert in Montreal where the host neglected to show, leaving him to play to two deaf girls, one of whom fell asleep. Mallory was a beautifully empathetic tale detailing how the night played out before aptly morphing into David Bowie’s Young Americans.

While I’m Down was followed by Craigie’s brilliantly mournful ode to his home state, I am California. Bolstered by bursts of melancholic harmonica, Craigie’s languid guitar underpinned a haunting tale of nostalgia and longing that never fails to bring a tear to the eye of any Californian who finds themselves far from the Golden State. Having been cornered at the merchandise table and interrogated about the Trump presidency at the previous night’s Lyric’s Underground show, Craigie next delivered his response to the first MAGA go-round, Laurie Rolled Me a J, before rapturously and fittingly closing out the night’s set with Dissect the Bird.

Craigie then returned with Valazza for an encore of Neil Young’s Comes a Time. One of the greatest virtues of a John Craigie performance is that it can take you anywhere. Craigie has previously toured audiences through new releases and select albums by The Beatles, while tonight was a journey through the tracks of his life. No matter what songs he tackles, one constant of every Craigie show is the narrative hilarity that ensues. Sometimes his tales lead into songs, and sometimes they meander their way to a punchline, but no matter how many times you see Craigie perform, they always help to ensure a unique and treasured shared experience.

BRETT LEIGH DICKS

Photos by Brett Leigh Dicks