Melanie: Live at Caffe Lena, Christmastime

SARATOGA SPRINGS -- 'Twas the night before the night, before the night before Christmas, and Melanie Safka came to Caffè Lena bearing the gifts of her musical songbook.
A talented songwriter, she performed in the role of a holiday chanteuse.

She opened with a dark, bluesy rendition of 'Santa Claus is Coming to Town,' delivered stirring versions of
'Good King Wenceslas' and her self-penned Christmas lullaby, 'Tonight's the Kind of Night.'

Melanie as accompanied throughout by son Beau Jarred Schekeryk, who plucked his guitar as fast as lightning,
the electro-acoustical notes firing off like a mating between the flamenco guitar and the bouzouki, and channeling his six-string resonator into a chorus of thousands.

She invited song requests from the audience, and honored a number of them, performing her popular tune 'Beautiful People,' and offered a revamped version of 'Lay Down (Candles in the Rain),' accompanied by a quintet of area vocalists who referred to themselves as 'The Melan-oids.'

She also performed an extended version of 'Brand New Key' that bordered on the theatrical.
The tune that has been her biggest 'hit' also nearly wrecked her career, she explained in an onstage version that was graced by a charming stream of consciousness and tinterspersed with fragments of her vintage tunes 'Somebody Loves Me' and 'I Don't Eat Animals.'

If it was classic Melanie the capacity crowd was yearning for, it was most readily found in her newest material.

Strumming away with head tilted back and eyes brightly scaling the crowd, she belted out the harmonic melodies on the songs 'Make it Work for Me' and 'To Be the One,' from her new release, 'Paled by Dimmer Light.'

And shortly before closing down for the night, she raised the hackles of the room's intensity in the delivery of her post-9/11 song, '(Say a Little Prayer) 'Till They All Get Home,' as a large black-and-white image of Lena Spencer, looming on the caffè wall, appeared to look on, wrapping the foggy ghosts of Christmas past together with the hope-filled dreamy ones in the future.

by Thomas Dimopoulos
The Saratogian, Dec. 24, 2004