Take three big personalities, an arsenal of great songs and an intimate room and it equated to another notable showing by Robin Meade and some of her songwriting friends.
The host of HLN's "Morning Express" already proved last fall that she's more than the novelty of a TV personality with a hankering for a vanity project.
Her two country-leaning albums -- "Count on Me" and "Brand New Day" -- are solid enough efforts, but given her natural ability to play to a crowd – and a camera – she radiates warmth onstage.
Friday night at Eddie’s Attic, the second time she’s played the venue in four months, Meade was again joined by first-rate singer-songwriter-keyboardist Victoria Shaw and, for the first time, country singer-songwriter-guitarist Gary Burr.
Shaw and Burr probably have 100 hits between them – she for such notables as Garth Brooks (“The River”) and John Michael Montgomery (“I Love the Way You Love Me”) and he for Juice Newton (“Love’s Been a Little Bit Hard on Me,” Burr’s first hit) and Wynonna Judd (“To Be Loved By You”).
For a couple of hours inside a sold-out Eddie’s, the trio traded off songs – Meade with “Here for You,” “A Nice Bunch of Girls” and her sweetly humorous ode to marriage, “Gonna Be Days” among them, while Burr chimed in with the lovely ballad, “What Mattered Most” and Shaw with the bouncy “There’s a Song in There Somewhere.”
In between, they teased, joked and made the crowd (which included Atlanta Falcons head coach Mike Smith) feel as if they were hanging out with a bunch of old buddies.
Meade even challenged herself to play keyboard in front of people for the first time in 25 years, she said, and acquitted herself quite nicely on the pensive “Your Glory Days,” a song she wrote with Sugarland’s Kristian Bush.
At her last Eddie’s outing, Meade welcomed R.E.M.’s Mike Mills to join her onstage for a song. This time, it was the underrated Angie Aparo, a terrific singer-songwriter, who climbed onstage, made a few sharp-witted jokes and unleashed a raw, unvarnished version of “Cry,” a song he wrote in 1999 and became a Grammy-winning hit for Faith Hill a few years later.
This “Round Robin” format that Meade has showcased twice in Atlanta allows her – and her musician friends – the perfect outlet for self-deprecation and a fun, loose presentation.
Let’s hope she makes it a regular occurrence.
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