NEW YORK (RnB Magazine) - Towards the end of Lauryn Hill's set at the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday (June 14) ?- the second stop on a summer tour that finds her hooking up with the Smoking Grooves festival later in the month -- the large outdoor amphitheater glowed a warm orange hue.
It wasn't from the 12,000-or-so fans holding up lighters simultaneously, though ?- it was from the house lights, which were inexplicably turned up during an unreleased, fingerpicked ballad that Hill was right in the middle of playing. Though most of the audience stayed in its seats, many in the crowd took the rising lights as their cue to leave. And so, as Hill thanked the audience for coming, those fans were already in their cars, braving the notorious Bowl traffic to get home just a little bit earlier.
As those people shuffled out, it was hard to tell whether they had somewhere to be or if they were just fed up with Hill, whose hit-and-miss set could have confused the passing fans. It wasn't much different than her recent appearance on MTV's Unplugged -? Hill sat with a guitar and notebook, alone onstage for most of the show, starting and stopping some numbers, mumbling and giggling to herself and the audience about "inner freedom," and strumming mostly new material that often sounded not-quite-finished (a fact that Hill acknowledged when she abruptly stopped playing one tune and said, "I think I'll just end there.") But if people were at the show to hear the hits, they were in the wrong place; other than a reworked "To Zion," Hill ignored her studio output completely.
Like the Unplugged show, there were moments of Hill's Miseducation-era brilliance that occasionally and unexpectedly emerged. One new song included the lyric "this current social structure's too claustrophobic/let me loose," an awkward-looking bunch of words that Hill's unique phrasing transformed into a soulful plea. And, when Hill invited a drummer onstage for a few songs, he changed the vibe completely, forcing the artist to focus on her rhythmic playing and giving her the musical space to rap, if just for a little bit.
He also underscored what's wrong with Hill's recent material. Without other musicians to keep her in check, Hill's newer songs meander, often forgoing choruses for a lyrical onslaught of emotional truth. Hill's guitar playing is so rudimentary that the songs blend into each other, one mid-tempo reggae bump after another. But, augmented by a full-band arrangement, there's room for them to come alive.
The Bowl show gave a tantalizing, if protracted, glimpse of that future, and proved this: When Lauryn gets her groove back, she'll once again be a force to be reckoned with.
