They got stuck in the mountains. Could there be any more perfect metaphor for Willy Mason and his band? They, along with headliner Sondre Lerche and the Faces Down, were forced to delay their intended Friday night rendezvous with Chicago until Sunday thanks to a mighty snowstorm that stranded them in Montana. Let’s momentarily suspend our disbelief about the very real hassles incurred by a touring musician when such a thing comes to pass — the being stuck out in the middle of God knows where, foregoing gainful employment for a night, perhaps being out of communication-range of cellphones and wifi, idly fantasizing about throttling one’s tourmates after too much time together in close quarters. Let’s set these commonplace realities aside and instead dream of the poetry of the open air, the intense, thick blankets of snow, the precarious roadways lacing the mountainsides, the terrifying grandeur of the American West both blessed and cursed by its epic landscape and the impartiality of the whims of nature. Is this what it looks like inside our young troubadour’s head? Is this the outer manifestation of what courses through our wandering minstrel’s blood when he sits down with his guitar and dreams of being better than oxygen and cooler than TV? We may never know definitively, but watching him and his band on stage — these beautiful, delicate, rapturous, awkward kids — unspooling a sweet, smooth, slow, cascading molasses river of sound, you can hear them pulling the twilight duskiness of big sky country and the open road down into their instruments. It’s enough to make you want to raise an open palm above your head and testify: halle-fucking-lujah. Rock ’n’ roll.

Under less poetically auspicious circumstances, how do they do it? When they aren’t fresh from the crisp mountain air, all but still kicking the snow off the soles of their boots and shaking the flakes out of their hair, how do they keep the spirit of fishin’ holes and tiny animal figurines whittled on the porch by Papaw in between the reverberations of the violin strings, in between brushstrokes on the snare, in between the deeply felt notes escaping from Willy’s lips? I’m not sure even they know. There’s a hesitance that haunts them on stage, something ghostly that seems to terrify some infinitesimally small part of them that they’d probably prefer to keep hidden. It’s not anything as prosaic as stage fright. There’s a sweet, quiet kindness in Willy’s demeanor that one would never suspect of him based on the cadences of his rich vocals on his albums, a kind of come-what-may easygoingness that one often sees in the stoner boyfriends of women with huge personalities, an easygoingness that should never be mistaken for indifference or weakness. Perhaps Willy is tending to The Music as a gentle boyfriend would, ministering to Her needs, while his own ego takes a voluntary backseat? That’s one way to become better than oxygen.

One doesn’t want to keep harping on the ages of these musicians, but their youth, butted up against the old-soul knowingness of the songs, turns the stale, smoky, beery air of the rock club into something like an atmosphere of pure hope. It’s like the musical equivalent of the film “Children of Men,” a reminder of the symbolic power of the newborn — a newborn talent in this case. The chaotic, destructive power of a young group like Be Your Own Pet is one way to communicate it, and here we have quite another. A cynic might deride the style of the songcraft as appropriation, as a purely formal technique learned wholesale rather than earned or learned by apprenticeship or trial and error or lived experience, but Willy’s not on some Zach Condon trip here, hoovering up Old World tradition as a shorthand for depth. He and his band are, if anything, channeling. They put one in a mind of wormholes, connecting their audiences in 21st-century Anycity, USA, with our rural roots 100+ years in the past. They’re an MP3 of the earliest shows at the Grand Ole Opry, efficiently delivering a very local, yet timeless feeling to our hungry, weary ears.

Where Willy Mason brings the crickets and prairie grass, Sondre Lerche brings 1920s Paris by way of late 1970s Manhattan. Everything you need to know about him and his current tour can be summed up by the shirt he wore on that chilly Sunday night in Chicago: a skin-tight, V-neck T-shirt repping for skinny indie boys everywhere, drenched in the most exquisite dark lavender color, the kind of purple F. Scott Fitzgerald would have given his eyeteeth for in an immaculately tailored raw silk shirt.

Just as it’s joyfully shocking to hear Willy and his band connect so effortlessly to a kind of timeless, rustic musical idiom, it’s jaw-dropping and forehead-smacking and tear-back-blinkingly exhilarating to hear Lerche and his Faces Down blow through all manner of jazz, punk, bossa nova, Europop, and sensitive acoustic boy-with-guitar signifiers with equal parts commitment and dexterity. If authenticity is something music fans seem to be thinking a lot about these days, this stylistic shape-shifting in the context of one night and the early stages of one career is either wholly inauthentic or as authentic as it comes, depending on how much latitude you’re willing to grant a gifted 20-something Norwegian singer-songwriter with a knack for melody and an enthusiasm as broad, one would assume, as his own record collection. The effect is heightened even further by the fact that his band doesn’t seem to be faking it; they’ve got the chops to handle every sonic dime-turn and they’re doing it with huge, lucky-duck grins on their faces. No tortured geniuses here! Those pale, pasty virtuosic white guys save the whole thing from academic sterility or empty genre gesturing by really playing their hearts out, by meaning it. If the dark underbelly of the word “cosmopolitan” sometimes connotes a blasé disaffection as it catalogs all the myriad specialties it’s been there, done, and seen — the boredom of the burden of too much choice — the Faces Down bring all the hope and giddiness of the expectation of sophisticated worldliness that the country mouse brings to her urban adventure when she first arrives at the city limits. It’s like they’re opening a new box of crayons every night — there’s the assurance that the same 64 colors will be waiting for them like they always are, but ah, the smell, the wonder, the freshness, the beauty and possibility of it all. What friendly, bright renderings they will create out of thin air for us tonight.

If the crowd didn’t exactly know what to do with Willy Mason’s precocity, they did know what they wanted to do with Sondre’s: they wanted an equal exchange of energy. Rather than translating that as the kind of grabby, “entertain us, monkey boy” challenge a crowd can sometimes demand of a performer, like they’ve done something that’s owed a reward simply by showing up and standing there en masse, the assembled super-fans seemed almost panicked that they wouldn’t be able to adequately convey how much they love Sondre’s music, how well they know his albums. The applause was as deafening as it could get in such a tiny space, and the cheers of recognition at the beginning of each familiar song’s introduction went beyond mere excitement or anticipation of aural satisfaction — it was a shout that tried to summon a connection, or even physical proof of some sort, to all the previous spins these tunes had taken in the audience members’ stereos or MP3 players. It was an applause-o-meter not just for the song as it existed that night, but for all nights in the past, for the expectation of future nights where new friends’ lives could be changed with the simple promise, “Just wait til you hear this.” And the audience wasn’t just seeming to say these things through a kind of karmic or vibrational reciprocity; they actually, verbally said them, too. Just as Sondre was getting ready to wind his band up into the easy groove of their namesake song “Faces Down,” a voice from the throng called out, “This is real music!” And rather than sallying back in response with the same kind of intelligently self-deprecating Woody Allen-ish stammering wit that he’d batted around effortlessly during the rest of his between-song banter, Sondre simply replied, “Well, we love being musicians.” And, it is a state of being. The choice of words is telling. I’m sure they love playing music, too, but the love of being musicians — that’s the kind of love that takes you up a mountain, through a snowstorm, and across the plains to spend a short night of smiles and guitar spazz-outs and drum solos and sha la la las in a beery little club in Chicago.

Willy Mason Official Site
Sondre Lerche Official Site
Astralwerks Records