Review: John Fullbright at Kessler Theater

John Fullbright, guitar in his hands, harmonica around his neck, paused for a moment.

“Isn’t [the Kessler Theater] a cool place?” he asked the room, a query greeted by lusty, affirmative shouts.

He waited a beat.

“It’s haunted as hell, though.”

The Oklahoma singer-songwriter was joking, mostly — “I get real spooked out by stuff,” he confessed — but in talking about the venue he was headlining, he was also talking about the music he was making.

John Fullbright’s set Friday night, before a rapt audience that nearly filled the dimly lit Kessler to capacity, was a satisfying sojourn with no particular destination.

The 27-year-old musician would occasionally glance at a scrap of paper, but often, Friday felt like he was, thrillingly, just making up the concert on the fly.

Performing alone, on both acoustic guitar and piano, Fullbright’s song selection pulled from his own pair of records, including last year’s stunning Songs, but was haunted by the ghosts of those gone before: Hoyt Axton, Townes Van Zandt and Tom Skinner.

“We just lost Tom — that was a hard blow,” Fullbright said, before seeming, spontaneously, to pay tribute to his friend and mentor: “I’m gonna play a Skinner song.”

His rendition of Christel is a Rambling Girl  was an understated, poignant homage to a foundational figure in Oklahoma music — to watch Fullbright play the tune was to see that particular creative lineage renewing itself for a new generation.

The freewheeling nature of the night was such that Fullbright, who admitted “one of my primary anxieties in life is whistling on stage,” could play Happy, in which whistling features prominently, and let the audience take the tricky whistling solo.

It made for a convivial, relaxed atmosphere — an audience member down front passed up a tumbler of bourbon to Fullbright at one point — giving the Kessler, one of the few venues in town capable of cultivating such a setting, the feel of an intimate house show.

As he sat down at the piano for the back half of his 90-minute showcase, Fullbright took a melancholy turn, reeling off one broken-hearted ballad after another: When You’re Here; She Knows; Very First Time and Unlocked Doors.

All of it beautiful, all of it exquisitely rendered — Fullbright’s full-throated bellow, complimented by his dexterous guitar work or limber keyboard attack — but most of all, profoundly haunting. John Fullbright keeps getting better, and, as impossible as it seems, he really has only just begun.

It would have been enough to luxuriate in Fullbright’s set, but the Kessler had another treat to begin the night: John Moreland, returning to the venue he’d dazzled just six months ago.

The 30-year-old singer-songwriter continues to tour behind his excellent new record, High on Tulsa Heat, although he revealed Friday that he’s beginning work on a new LP next week in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Although he told the audience he was “getting over allergies” — Moreland’s voice was a bit clotted, but he powered through — it didn’t seem to dull his edge any. The room’s attention was riveted on Moreland’s plaintive, emotionally blistering songs — Break My Heart Sweetly, Heart’s Too Heavy or 3:59 AM — which find endlessly captivating ways to render acute romantic trauma as folk-rock hymns.

A particular line from Moreland’s Hang Me in the Tulsa County Stars resonated Friday, applying as it did to both men on the bill: “Let the charmers leave the room/Let them have that Nashville moon.”

Country music may have an abundance of charm, but it does not have nearly enough of what Moreland and Fullbright bring to the stage.

This story was originally published October 17, 2015 at 12:23 PM with the headline "Review: John Fullbright at Kessler Theater."