"She don't want to hear no secrets/she would guarantee me that/she knows there ain't no words than can describe her..."

Yesterday evening I was fortunate enough to hear Arlo Guthrie, son of the prolific folk singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie, as he stopped by UWGB on his "Alice's Restaurant 40th Anniversary Massacree" tour. Arlo's unique blend of folk and country blues is far from the heavy rock music I ordinarily listen to, but I've always had a special fondness for his work. Maybe it's his incredible, evocative voice, or his sense of humor ("I've always maintained that songwriting is a lot like fishing. You're just sitting there, and the songs are swimming by. If you've got a pen, you can catch 'em-unless you're unlucky enough to be sitting downstream from Bob Dylan").

Arlo played the aforementioned Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man", as well as crowd favorites "Coming into Los Angeles", "City of New Orleans", "The Motorcycle Song", and of course the (in)famous "Alice's Restaurant" ("This is a song about Alice, and the restaurant, but Alice's Restaurant is not the name of the restaurant it's just the name of the song, and that's why I call this song 'Alice's Restaurant'"). The title of this post is a line from the beautiful "In My Darkest Hour", a song Arlo says came to him in a dream ("Most of the songs I wrote, I wrote when I was awake, but not all of 'em. I had this dream and there was this guy singing this song in the dream. When I woke up I couldn't remember if it was me singing the song, so I didn't know if it was my song or what. But I figured, 'What the hell, my dream'").

Also included in the set were some of Woody Guthrie's material, the classic "This Land is Your Land" and "My Peace", which Arlo had just set to music for the first time for this tour ("My father wrote hundreds of songs that he never recorded, but he didn't know how to write music, so nobody knows how the songs go").