DORI FREEMAN Letters Never Read (Blue Hens Music) Dori Freeman’s voice is on permanent vacation. While some singers can sound as if every sinew of their body is vibrating with the effort of translating song to ear - working hard to convince, working harder to hold our attention – Freeman’s voice sounds as if it is stretched out by the pool, occasionally peeking over the top of a chunky book to ask for a top-up of the tall glass beside it. In the Laurel Canyon-meets-Rufus Wain

Dori Freeman St Stephen’s Uniting Church, January 28 It’s not the past, which you’re guessing about, that can trip you up sometimes; it can instead be the supposedly familiar present. Plenty of people play music in old-fashioned styles, old-fashioned structures and, often enough, old-fashioned clothes. Some of them take on the mannerisms, accents and language of that past too. It is respect and fandom and fetishism in varying degrees. Virginian singer/songwriter Dori Freeman,