PORT TOWNSEND — In “Life Is Good Blues,” singer Laura Cortese offers some folk philosophy:
Life is good when the band is smoking hot
The drummer drums like it’s the
last chance that he’s got . . .
Life is good
when you know he feels the same thing . . .
Cortese, who brings her trio to The Upstage tonight, seeks to generate some current.
“I’m trying to create a circuit between me and the audience,” she says.
The 32-year-old singer started out a fiddle player, a San Francisco-born musician who went off to the Berklee College of Music in Boston.
For tonight’s show, Cortese will stir together music from previous projects, such as her band the Poison Oaks, with songs from her own new album “Into the Dark.”
She and her band are sharing the bill tonight with Fish & Bird, a Victoria-based folk quintet. The group, whose latest CD is “Every Whisper Is a Shout Across the Void,” is one of Cortese’s “absolute favorite bands.”
Show time is 7:30 p.m. at The Upstage, 923 Washington St., the cover charge is $8 and more details are at 360-385-2216.
Cortese’s music on “Into the Dark” roams from the lilting “Heel to Toe,” written by her friend Sean Staples, to the Shaker hymn “Lay Me Low.” Cortese gives each her own blend of salt and sugar.
“These songs chose me,” she writes on the CD liner notes. “Whether I wrote them or learned them from friends, these are the songs that would not let me rest until they were shared.”
The live show, Cortese promises, is propelled by an unusual set of engines. While Cortese plays violin and viola, Mariel Vandersteel adds another fiddle while Valerie Thompson plays cello.
This trio of instruments is unusual in the rock-folk-Americana setting, Cortese notes.
“There’s the groovy, fiddle-rock ’n’ roll energy part of it,” she says, “and we all sing at the same time. There’s a lot of harmony vocals.
“We have highly arranged, lush textures, all the way to dance-party raging fiddle.”
To learn more about tonight’s show, visit www.UpstageRestaurant.com. For more on Cortese, visit www.ThisIsLauraCortese.com.
