A three-hour drive up the road afforded the opportunity to catch both Alejandro Escovedo (the No Depression print magazine's artist of the decade for the 1990s) and Buddy Miller (our artist of the decade for the 2000s, in our final print issue) on the same night, at different venues, in Richmond, Virginia. So I took it.

Timing turned out to be a little tricky, as both shows were early-starts; thus, I ended up seeing Alejandro's first set and part of his second at the impressive Virginia Museum of Fine Art, and then drove ten minutes up the road to the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in time to catch Buddy playing guitar with Patty Griffin (but I missed Buddy's own set, as well as that of bonus opener Scott Miller). All in all, though, a very enjoyable night out, if a little unusual to be replacing bar-hopping with museum-and-garden-hopping.

Escovedo has a new record coming out later this month, as you may know. Buddy and Patty, once they finish this tour, will shortly be teaming up again on the road, as part of Robert Plant's new Band Of Joy ensemble (along with Darrell Scott and a couple other folks whose names unfortunately escape me at the moment). Buddy mentioned another intriguing project that's also in the works, though the album apparently won't be out until early 2011: It's called (if I recall correctly) the Majestic Silver Strings and includes Miller, Bill Frisell, Marc Ribot and Greg Leisz, joined by a variety of guest vocalists.

The museum gig -- apparently the first in the newly reopened and beautifully reconstructed Virginia Museum Of Fine Art -- proved a bit of a challenge for Escovedo at first, in terms of finding the right tone to strike in a large open atrium with white walls and glass enclosures and skybridges and stairways. He played two or three ballads in the middle of his first set, probably presuming that quieter stuff might better suit the venue; but he eventually realized that the way to make this work was just to contrast the stateliness of the setting with the hard edges in his music. So he pulled out "Everybody Loves Me" and "Castanets" and the Stones' "Beast Of Burden", and that's when everything finally seemed to click.

The most profound musical moment for me, though, was something he played in a little room downstairs to a small handful of folks shortly before going onstage. Alejandro had asked his road manager to fetch him his acoustic guitar from upstairs; sitting around backstage, Escovedo just feels more comfortable if he has his guitar by his side. Music is never far from Alejandro's hands; I have little doubt that without it, he would presently cease to take another breath.

Anyhow, he started fiddling around on the guitar a little -- running through a sort of bluesy reworking of his old song "Falling Down Again" -- and then suddenly he and bandmate David Pulkingham were doing this beautiful, yet dark, and entirely magical little tune. Alejandro was singing and picking a simple progression on his acoustic, and Pulkingham was playing....what, exactly, was he playing? I could hear something, but couldn't quite see, as he was sort of hidden from view on the other side of the room. I peered around the corner and saw him plunking away at something small in his hands. Turns out he was playing a piano on his iPhone. And, somehow, it was the perfect accompaniment for the song, for the moment.

I'd thought maybe this was some obscure Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits or maybe Velvets number -- it had that kind of vibe to it -- but it turns out it's an Escovedo original, and will only be included as a format-specific bonus track on his upcoming album (either iTunes, or vinyl, or perhaps both?). It's worth the extra effort to track it down.

Pulkingham mentioned that they actually used an iPhone app on some other track from the upcoming record, to which Alejandro related having once seen Sam Phillips (the female singer, not the male record producer) do an instrumental solo onstage that consisted of her holding a tape recorder up to the microphone and playing prerecorded noise-snippets. I mentioned having recently seen a Low Anthem gig where they called each other on two celll phones onstage midsong and held the two phones up to each other, creating a "feedback" solo. To which Escovedo replied, "Oh, yeah, we were doing that a long time ago! We used to drag these big phone booths up onstage with us...."

(For an Artist of the Decade, Escovedo has always been a pretty funny fellow, too.)

A couple hours and a short drive up the road later, I was comfortably stretched out on a grassy hillside at the bucolically beautiful Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, listening to Patty Griffin sing, with her bandmates and Buddy Miller backing her up. The sun had just gone down; the setting, and the music, were preciously peaceful, even as faint shadows of lightning began dancing on the far horizon. The lightning, actually, turned out to be part of the magic of the moment: When Griffin sang "Coming Home To Me," my favorite track from her new album, I turned away from the stage and just listened to the music as I watched the sky become illuminated with streaks and bursts way off in the distance, casting light upon an open field as Griffin's heavenly voice and majestic melodies drifted through the sweet twilight air.

There's a place in the song where Griffin acknowledges precisely what is so emotionally powerful about music. On the recorded version, she and Julie Miller (Buddy's wife) are weaving in and out of each other's voices in a twist and tangle as they sing the lyrics -- "When you get there you'll know that's as far as you go, when you get there you'll see you were already free" -- and then they finally give up trying to explain, and give in to the melody: "When you get there you la la la la la...."

In that moment, the words have taken the story as far as they can go. The rest has to be told solely by the sound. I'm reminded of a bridge near the end of Jackson Browne's song "Fountain Of Sorrow", which is a masterwork of storytelling in its own right; and yet, in that particular place in the song, everything slows down, and there are no lyrics to be sung. The rest of the story is told by the sequence of keys Browne strokes on the piano, and those notes reveal far more than anything he might have tried to relate in words.

I felt that, again, as Griffin sang "la la la la la" across the gardens and the grasses and the clouds and the fields and the flickering glow of the oncoming storm. When you get there, you'll know.... and, yeah, I do know, now that I've heard nothing more than the sound of her voice.