Lancaster Music Festival (part 2…)
There’s that thing about Americans. No NHS over there but they’ve all got nice teeth. Van Preston has nice teeth. I know that because she smiles a lot. She also sings country and she sings it well. Nonetheless, it’s kind of odd to find someone hailing from Arkansas in a pub in Lancaster.
I’m working on a concept here. You take someone with all the polish of Nashville – and Van Preston is nothing if not polished – and you transport them somewhere else. That somewhere else is the Ring of Bells pub. It’s the kind of place where women wear lap dancer shoes and tie their hair back with purple scrunchies. Maybe not all of them but enough of them to distract a man from his beer.
Van Preston is an accomplished and very commercial songwriter. Her voice soars over the background chatter. No slouch on the guitar, she nonetheless brings on a boy to accompany her while she takes the audience on a journey through her self-titled album. “Tougher than That” stands proud but, maybe due to politeness or maybe they just didn’t get the point, the audience doesn’t react to the sly and sassy charms of “Bought Myself a Toy”.
I’ll give her this. She never lets up. Whether performing her own songs or exercising her interpretive skills on standards like “Sweet Home Chicago”, Van Preston proves to be an appealing performer with an obvious and rather endearing warmth.