Live Review: Stephanie Lambring, The Lounge, The Crescent Hotel, Scarborough – 10th April 2025

Tonight’s concert provided me with a couple of personal firsts, starting with the two-and-a-half-hour journey north from my hometown of Lincoln, which brought me, for the first time, to the historic seaside town of Scarborough. Situated on the Yorkshire coastline and founded by the Danes in the 10th Century, the town was first permitted, in the Royal Charter of 1253, to hold a six-week trading festival which attracted merchants from across Europe running from the 15th August (Assumption Day, according to the Church of England) and the 29th September (Michaelmas Day). The fair continued to be held for over 500 years,  from the 13th to the 18th Century, and is of course, commemorated to this day by the legendary folk song ‘Scarborough Fair’.

The location for tonight’s concert, The Crescent Hotel, did not exist during the time of the fair, having not been built until the 19th Century. However, with its central location, nestling amid the town’s Cultural Quarter and surrounded by a fine collection of Regency Buildings in front of the Crescent Gardens, the ground floor lounge offered a splendid location for the evening’s special guest, who, thanks to the hard work of local promoter Chris Lee, was playing her second show in East Yorkshire, having performed in Beverley the previous night.

It has now been well over a decade since Stephanie Lambring last played in the UK. Having released her debut album “Lonely To Alone” in 2008, which received some high-profile airplay in the UK by none other than Bob Harris, Lambring toured these shores in 2010 including some house concerts with Old Dominion guitarist Brad Tursi. However, at this particular time, she felt unready for the challenges of being an artist, and consequently stepped away from the limelight to concentrate on writing songs for others, something she would do successfully for the next decade, including contributing one song ‘Coat Of Paint’, for the highly popular TV series ‘Nashville’. Then, in 2020, she returned to the studio and released her sophomore album “Autonomy”, which quite simply knocked the proverbial ball out of the park with our very own Helen Jones placing the album in her top 5 Americana Albums of the 21st Century. This was followed and possibly even bettered last year by the release of her third album “Hypocrite“, and off the back of that album, Lambring has finally returned to the UK to perform a short run of shows.

With no support act this evening, Lambring took to the stage for the first of two sets relatively early with the venue, though not completely sold out, still housing a healthy turnout for a mid-week gig. The stage, slightly raised, was set in the far corner of the elongated lounge with mainly soft seating to both the front and the right. The early part of the first set focused on Lambring’s second album, the much lauded “Autonomy”, starting first with ‘Little White Lie’, that immediately exposed the honesty and vulnerability at the very heart of both her poetry and vocal delivery, which during the first few tracks was laced with just the slightest trace of understandable nerves.

One of the things that marks Lambring out as a truly unique songwriter is her willingness to tackle subject matters that other writers would choose to swerve. This was evident during each of the next three numbers, with firstly the self-explanatory ‘Daddy’s Disappointment’, followed by ‘Pretty’ that calls out the inappropriate behaviour of grown men blazingly voicing their opinions on the bodies of teenage girls, which, until very recently, was commonplace. The last of this trio was the sinister ‘Mr Wonderful’, a tale of insidious coercive control inspired, as she informs the audience, by her own experience of having been forced to take out a ‘Restraining Order’.

At this point, Lambring, now sounding much more relaxed and comfortable with her surroundings, having come to terms with how intensely UK audiences listen compared to back in the US, took the opportunity to share memories of her early years with the evening’s congregation. Born and raised in Indiana, Lambring spent the first 19 years of her life growing up in a family with devout views on Christianity, views she would come to challenge in later years once moving to Nashville which has now been her home for an equivalent amount of time. Once settled in Country Music’s capital, she came to recognise the duplicity and small-mindedness that framed those early years, along with the personal impact it had inflicted. Anxiety, low self-confidence, and low self-esteem. This honest and revealing introduction led seamlessly into the next song ‘Joy Of Jesus’, sung with such intensity, eyes closed almost throughout, as if totally lost in the moment, and yet still holding the audience in the palm of her hand. Rarely has anything felt so powerful and so fragile all at the same time.

From here, it was time to introduce some songs from the new album to the set-list starting with the self-reflective song ‘Mirror’, before the heart-rendering ‘Good Mother’, which again dared to address some of life’s darkest feelings, the disquieting narrative offering neither pity nor judgement. Two tracks from the sophomore album followed, firstly ‘Fine’, which lifts the tempo with its anthemic chorus “Whatever you’re doing, you’re doing just fine”, before ‘Old Folks Home’, a song written while Lambring was helping at a local hospice during the pandemic, rounded of the first set.

The second set took on a somewhat reverse role to the first, with the bulk of the songs coming from the new album. That said, there was still time for three more songs from “Autonomy” starting with the achingly beautiful ‘Save Me Tonight’ and the stunning ‘Somebody Else’s Dress’, another number that stands up for the LGBT movement. There’s also time for a cover of R.E.M’s ‘Losing My Religion’, a song that appeared as a bonus track on “Autonomy”, which for the uninitiated, may seem like a strange choice but for those in the know, such as tonight’s audience, it is a perfect fit, stripped back to just a strummed guitar and sublime vocals.

Throughout the rest of the set Lambring introduced the congregation to another five songs from last year’s album “Hypocrite” starting with ‘Filler’ with its narrative that questions the fixation for body beautiful while ‘Purity Ring’ took another swipe at the pressures inflicted by religious beliefs on abstinence and no sex before marriage, delivered with an energy and potency more akin to the Grunge music of Nirvana and a million miles from the so-called country music that infiltrates so much of the charts these days. ‘Next up, the dynamic ‘Cover Girl’ was another that berated the image-conscious pressures forced on the young.

Though many of Lambring’s songs revolve around the everyday challenges of the modern world, she is just as adept at telling stories, so wonderfully borne out on ‘Jasper’, a track inspired by a character remembered from her childhood growing up in her home town, population no more than 500, and their small-minded ways.

The second set was brought to a close with two more numbers from the new album, starting with the delightfully catchy ‘Two Faced’ with its tongue-in-cheek narrative that reminded us that we can all be guilty of being insincere from time to time, before the wonderfully poignant ‘Hospital Parking’ with its emotional rollercoaster narrative concluded proceedings. Unsurprisingly, the audience was never going to let Lambring leave without an encore, to which she duly obliged with a number that she co-wrote, though as yet has not personally recorded, with Caroline Spence. The song in question was the delightful ‘All The Beds I’ve Made’, which was included on Spence’s 2017 album “Spades And Roses”.

Having now returned to the UK, the hope is that Lambring will make these visits to the UK a regular occurrence for there is without doubt, very few songwriters as talented or as brave, willing to tackle some of life’s most difficult topics and yet still deliver them with such poetic grace and humility that they in turn give a voice to those who don’t have a voice of their own. And in these most challenging of times, that surely is one of the greatest gifts of all.