Double feature
Kathy Mattea, a country star equally at home with Celtic, Appalachian and world music forms, will be backed by two fine bands Saturday night at the Spokane Opera House.
The first is Mattea’s own five-piece combo, a band she calls “pretty amazing.” The second will fill the rest of the stage: the Spokane Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of associate conductor Morihiko Nakahara.
Most of the time, they’ll all be onstage together.
“We bring our band and set up with the symphony and collaborate,” said Mattea, by phone from a tour date in Lake Tahoe. “I’m telling you, man, there are some symphony charts that have nearly made me burst into tears, they are so beautiful.”
Mattea does anywhere from two to 10 symphony dates per year, and sometimes she’ll hear the orchestral scores of her new songs for the first time, right along with the audience.
“The first time I heard ‘Mary, Did You Know?’ I thought, I’m going to have to start making grocery lists or something, because I’m going to tear up and not be able to go on.”
She also said she loves hearing the symphony players tear into some of her high-energy songs.
“There are moments, like in the song ‘455 Rocket,’ where the brass section gets featured, and they get to show off their jazz riffs,” said Mattea. “We also have Celtic thread running through our music. There’s this Irish jig we recorded a couple of albums back, ‘The Isle of Inishmoor.’ We get the whole orchestra going and it’s pretty spectacular. We’ve got (what sounds like) hundreds of fiddles going on that one. It’s great.”
Mattea summed up her goal for the concert like this: “If we do our job right, you’ll have at least one good surprise, one good belly laugh and maybe a tear or two before it’s all over with.”
Those who want to hear her hits won’t be disappointed. She’ll sing “Walking Away a Winner,” “Where’ve You Been,” “Come From the Heart” and a few other songs that fans will recognize.
Her latest album, “Right Out of Nowhere,” grew out of an all-acoustic set she and her band began doing at concerts.
“We started having so much fun that we went into studio and set up in a circle and had jam sessions,” she said. “We found we could do rockier stuff, because it’s not built around big drums and guitars. It was more about intensity than volume. We do everything from bluegrass songs to an acoustic version of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter.’”
Her next project has grown from her West Virginia roots. She’s exploring Appalachian-flavored tunes – where the “Celtic tradition meets Appalachia.”
“People who subscribe to the symphony might get more than they bargained for,” said Mattea. “They might get a surprise or two. And for the people who come out to see me, they might come back and see the symphony again. Getting to be the catalyst for people to open their minds about music – that’s part of fun, too.”