See CMAT run. And twirl, and kick, and dive

The sardonic Irish singer turns out to be an unmissable stage dynamo. Plus: docs on Paul Simon and Steve Martin

I saw rock and roll’s future, and its name is… Well, not quite. But I can say that even though I liked her two albums enough to put If My Wife New I’d Be Dead [sic] and Crazymad, for Me on my best-of-the-year lists in 2022 and 2023, I had no idea on Tuesday night that Ireland’s CMAT (Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson) was about to deliver one of the most uproarious and engaging live shows I’ve seen in years.

My bad pic of CMAT taken from the balcony of the Opera House on Tuesday.

Throughout the set, CMAT rarely stopped dancing, spinning, striking poses, kicking up her legs, diving to the floor, all the while winking and mugging and flirting for our benefit. An hour-and-a-half later, the 28-year-old looked ready to do it all again. The show had been bumped up from the Horseshoe to the Opera House, which she said was the largest venue they’d played on this North American tour—“Where did all ye Canadians come from?”

She took a willfully bad stab at a Canadian accent, made some remarks about U.S. fake positivity that pandered to local anti-Americanism, and then added some saucier ones about Canadian over-politeness (“I’m insulting someone as a joke and the Toronto people go, ‘Ooh, you shouldn’t do that’ ”). She asked why the guys in Toronto were “so jacked,” which I think was news to most of us. Mid-encore, mock-collapsing as if she couldn’t possibly go on further, she melodramatically teased, “No, we simply must go, we have to get out before the last Tim Horton’s closes.”

That audience awareness was in keeping with her genuinely warm, comedian-like crowd work, bantering for minutes at a time with the super-fans costumed in cowboy hats and other CMAT-song-related accessories in the front rows. She marveled, “The crowds, they come dressin’!”

But it wasn’t all jokes. It was also all belting out her melodious anthems of self-abnegation and faint hope without losing a breath while doing calisthenics, dashes across the stage, goofy dance routines and embraces with her very gay band, and a form of both mock and sincere twerking with her lingerie-clad backside facing the gilded full-length mirror on a platform upstage. Who was paying for this whole set, complete with neon CMAT sign, to be trucked from city to city? I guess Sony has some faith in her prospects.

From listening to her songs, I’d picked up on multiple influences and echoes in CMAT’s voice and style: various Nashville and alt-country sirens (her walk-in music was “9 to 5 (Morning Train)” by Sheena Easton; my friend Katherine pinpointed a vocal resemblance to Maria McKee, and I’d add some of the attitude of the Chicks’ Natalie Maines); a lot of Kate Bush-esque swoops, but not the gothy performance-artist The Dreaming Kate (who has so many heirs) so much as the more tender and whimsical but still weirdo early Kate; the swoony self-revelations of both Rufus and Martha Wainwright; the sardonic narrative observations of Kirsty Maccoll; and a Big Pop girl-group anthemic quality, equal parts Madonna, Spice Girls, and ABBA. Really, she’s just as much country-by-way-of-ABBA (schlager) as she is country any other way—see for instance her duet with the estimable John Grant, “Where Are Your Kids Tonight?”

The element I hadn’t imagined until I saw her live was Peaches, Toronto’s own cherubim of shamelessness. Then again, I also hadn’t known about CMAT making a stir at the Brit Awards last month with a dress that flamboyantly showed off her butt crack.

None of this took away from the fact that so many of her songs are about isolation and disappointment. About fucking up, being fucked over, and losing more than a little of your shit. The sadness behind the clown act was essential to the act itself. But she wasn’t lonely right then, and neither were we. We thought: Sure, we may be a bunch of losers when we’re at home, but right now one of us is up on stage. A somehow almost effortlessly talented avatar of us, but gawky and silly and one of us, nonetheless. And she’s loving it up there. So we’re loving it out here too, bonded in our outcast and bootless state—but not cowboy bootless, ’cuz we came dressin’. And that’s one of the best feelings live music can offer.

CMAT’s North American tour continues through the middle of next week. If you’re in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, or NYC, do yourself a kindness. Go.

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In other cultural consumption: I watched two new Apple TV documentaries about boomer icons this week: One, STEVE! (Martin): A Documentary in Two Pieces by Morgan Neville, who also made the monumental 20 Feet from Stardom and the tearjerking Mr. Rogers doc, among others. Two, In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, by Alex Gibney, better known for docs on topics like Enron, or Scientology. Each of the films is, I assume coincidentally, in two parts. Gibney’s is more integrated than Neville’s, but in each case one part roughly covers their subject’s artistic formation and rise to mindboggling fame. It’s particularly startling to see how Steve Martin developed his parody-of-comedy act over more than a decade until it became just unbelievably, insanely huge in the 1970s. To the point that it became redundant and Martin realized he had to quit it. He’d been ahead of his time, and then the times caught up.

Each film’s second half then comes around to more of a rounded portrait of the artist as an old man, puzzling over what he still might accomplish and, in Martin’s case particularly, taken aback by this stage’s surprising ease, with a wife and young child, after a life of neurotic discontent. His personal and artistic partnership with Martin Short also comes across as a saving grace, perhaps especially this week with the death of Short’s SCTV colleague Joe Flaherty.

Those structural contrasts, to me, helped make both of the documentaries pretty compulsive viewing. Most memorable of all were the extended scenes of an 80-year-old Simon in the studio, still uncertainly and obsessively crafting what would become last year’s Seven Psalms even after he’s mysteriously lost much of the hearing in one ear.

No doubt you need to care at least a bit beforehand about each of the figures involved. I’m probably more of a Simon fan than I like to admit, but it’s with many misgivings (in Slate I once called him “The Worst Great Songwriter”), and almost entirely for the solo stuff rather than Simon and Garfunkel. Martin I’ve mostly regarded with mild curiosity at a distance. Both Neville and Gibney make their stories about something larger than these guys and their work: where creativity comes from, where it goes under the pressures of aging and mortality, the process of growing out of addled masculinity, and whatever else we might project upon them. Though these celebrities did that with the help of $hitload$ of ca$h, which predictably neither film incorporates into its philosophical reflections. Obviously these are both safely artist-sanctioned and -managed documentaries, the only ones that get this kind of access now. But if you’re at all inclined, I say dive in.