Eliza Gilkyson

Your Town Tonight (Red House)

With the five albums she’s released on Red House Records, Eliza Gilkyson has arrived at the highest echelon of Austin’s songwriting community. While her studio output can be stately, exquisite, in concert Gilkyson loosens up into a familiar raconteur mode, relating background details on how a song came to be or, perhaps, making an amusing observation of everyday life. Your Town Tonight, the Austinite’s first live disc, is a near perfect representation of that experience. Recorded mostly at the Cactus Cafe, it captures a wide swath of what she’s been up to and where she’s headed next, from older originals like “Rose of Sharon” and “Lights of Santa Fe” to appealing covers of Bob Dylan’s “Jokerman” and her father Terry Gilkyson’s “Green Fields.” Intimate, inviting, and warm, Your Town Tonight is an ideal sampler for anyone yet to delight in the truth and beauty of Eliza Gilkyson.

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This article appears in August 3 • 2007.

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