Brooke Fraser, a three-time chart-topper in New Zealand, has just begun to get recognition in the United States. Brooke Fraser's stage piano, we learned at the sold-out Highline Ballroom on Friday, is named Angelo. She called her guitar Paul. She kidded around with her musicians and told digressive stories about nose hair and sewer rats (among other things) between songs. Her stage demeanor was joyful to the point of giddiness.
This is consequential because it's something you'd never guess from Fraser's recordings. The devotional pop singer, who has topped the charts in her native New Zealand with all three of her albums, specializes in poetic midtempo ballads that address the challenges of faith, written in language that is at once magisterial and intimate. Her "C.S. Lewis Song," a highlight of her set, folds lines from "Mere Christianity" into a stormy piano-driven rock song that recalls Tori Amos's "Under the Pink." "Crows and Locusts" is an apocalyptic vision intense enough to scare the bejeezus out of Tim LaHaye. "Albertine," the title track from her grave, gorgeous second album, was written after a trip to post-genocide Rwanda. "Now that I have seen," sang Fraser, "I am responsible."
A woman on a mission from the minute she first picked up a microphone, Fraser doesn't allow herself many silly love songs. "Something in the Water," her single from the newly released "Flags," is an exception. Even here, she made a point to peg the song to a relief effort -- Charity:Water, an organization that digs wells in developing countries. Fraser began the song with a lengthy pitch on behalf of the charity, and when she reached the line in the bridge where she allows herself "red wine, just a glass or two," she smiled widely and added "responsibly!"
It was impossible not to smile back. The kiwi pop star, who exhausted herself in 2008 by touring the heavy material from "Albertine," seems to have figured out a strategy for surviving her own intensity, and maybe even her high expectations for herself. Brooke Fraser hasn't eased up on her feelings of responsibility, but she's decided to enjoy the peculiar thrill of being deeply good. In so doing, she's become singing proof of one of her hero Lewis's most ardently made points: that the true believer, overwhelmed by love and generosity, would find herself set free.
Armored by joy, Fraser was capable of performing songs like "Ice on her Lashes," an uncompromising examination of grief, without losing her composure. Fraser and her four-piece band filled out the middle of the set with slow, brooding songs that often took sonic detours; as an open-minded New Zealander who has traveled to Africa and Southeast Asia, she incorporates tropes from world music into her pop with unusual sensitivity.
Fraser, a self-taught singer, has two great vocal strengths (she is also a fine pianist and guitar player). She's able to articulate her plosive consonants with great delicacy -- which means that no matter how acrobatic her melodies are, you can always make out exactly what she's singing. With each line, Fraser's soulful-but-proper delivery is telling you: the music may be pretty, but the message is paramount. She can also leap from a conversational lower register to a wild wail; and when she does, the effect is as electrifying as sudden revelation. These are skills she's developed through hard practice: on "What to Do With Daylight," her fine, if slightly precocious, debut, they were only hinted at. They came to maturity on "Albertine," and under the singer's control on "Flags."
It's important to note that while Fraser's perspective is unmistakably Christian, she does not identify herself as a CCM artist. On the contrary: she broke with the Christian music establishment on "Flags," writing and producing the record herself. At the helm, Fraser has proven to be just as dedicated to her faith and her causes as ever, even if the devotional content of her lyrics is somewhat less overt. After the force waves created by "Albertine" knocked her off balance, it took her four years to find her footing and come back with new material. That she has, and that she's as happy as she is while she's singing so well, felt like nothing short of triumph.