I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that Martin Sexton and KT Tunstall were a having a bit of fun about the Ed Sheeran copyright infringement lawsuit decision last week. If you don’t know the case, one of the writers of Marvin Gaye’s classic “Let’s Get It On” claimed that Sheeran violated the song’s copyright by using the same four-chord structure. Sheeran argued that pop songs, being fairly simple, often use the same chord structure. The court agreed and ruled in his favor.

Sexton, who played first in the double bill at The Birchmere on May 6, demonstrated just how many songs can use the same chord structure. He started playing his own “Hallelujah” and went into a medley of “With Or With You,” “Surrender,” “Wagon Wheel,” “No Woman, No Cry,” “Don’t Stop Believing,” and “Let It Be.” While the songs all clearly mapped onto the same chord structure, it was noticeable that the melody — which never changed — was different than how these songs were recorded. 

Tunstall didn’t make the point quite as strongly Sexton, but she got it in there with three medleys: her “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” and “Black Betty,” “All The Time” with “The Boys of The Summer,” and “All The Time” with “Walk Like an Egyptian” by the Bangles, who she described as the best all-woman rock band.

Sexton began the show by expressing “a real sense of gratitude” and playing “There I Go,” followed by “Diggin’ Me,” complete with whistling and French lyrics. Before “Freedom of the Road,” he told the sense, “Say your payers, because there’s a high note” at the end of the song. “Usually,” he added, “I do this at like 12. Tonight, 7:30.” — a reference to The Birchmere’s regular early concert start time.

Watch Martin Sexton perform “Freedom of the Road” live for eTown on YouTube:

After “Happy,” he switched from electric to acoustic guitar, saying he was “gonna folk it up.” He dedicated “Happy” to his mom. “I think I first played this song on this stage,” he said, referring to “Virginia.” He added, “I used to sing this on the streets and subways of Boston,” where he began his career, after growing up in Syracuse, New York. “The Way I Am,” he explained, is a song for “when you want to be depressed.”

When the pandemic hit in 2020, it forced Sexton off the road, but “some silver linings were behind those dark clouds for my family.” It was the longest he’s had to spend with them in a very long time. Martin shared a new song he wrote about it.

After his big medley, Sexton rounded out his set with “Diner” and “Black Sheep” and played “America, The Beautiful” for his encore.

Following a 30-minute intermission, Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall took the stage. Though she took piano lessons as a child, she said, she picked up the guitar herself as a teenager. “I never had a singing lesson,” she said, “but I felt like I had a singing teacher: Ella Fitzgerald.” She started her set with a song from Ella, with a few words swapped.

The set continued with “A Softer Place to Fall.” “I kept hearing the whispers,” she said. “No one listens to albums anymore.” But all the people she knows, herself included, still listen to them.

In reference to her latest album, Nut, KT said: “I went full 1970s. I made a trilogy.” The three albums — Kin, Wax, and Nut — took on the themes, respectively, of soul, body, and mind, and took seven years to complete.

Tunstall has a lot of charm, and, even when I couldn’t entirely follow her thread, she was still highly entertaining. Introducing “Dear Shadow,” which she wrote with Cathy Dennis (who wrote “Toxic”) for Britney Spears, she did a bit: “Just the bring the yeti to the table, first date. If they don’t like the yeti, they’re wrong person.” I’m not sure how we got to the yeti, but as someone who is thinking about writing children’s books called Spaghetti For A Yeti and Hairy Truman, BigFoot President, I enjoyed this. (As my friend Rashad says, the latter is even educational!) Later, she shared that her guitar’s name is “Shirley Manson,” which is a hell of a coincidence, as that’s also the name of the lead singer of Garbage. (Shirley, like KT, is Scottish.)

Watch KT Tunstall perform “Dear Shadow” live for Virgin Radio UK on YouTube:

Going “from a new one to an old one,” KT played “Other Side of the World,” which is about falling in love with a hippy from Vermont. I’m generally fond of hippies, and Vermont is a beautiful state, but too many people are heavily into Phish. On tour, she said, she and Martin have games they played to occupy their time. Spotting a man in a bow tie, she explained that, when one of them sees someone wearing a bow tie, they say, “rare breed.”

When she was just starting out, KT, like many musicians played open mics, but it “never quite felt like it was my place,” and she described a lot of what went on there as “musical therapy.” She always liked Fleetwood Mac, and she prefers “hiding my feelings in a a jam.”

After “Funnyman,” Tunstall talked about the Jewish hip-hop band she sang with before going solo. Some of their lyrics were in the Sephardic language Ladino, which mixes Spanish and Hebrew similarly to how the more well-known Ashkenazi language Yiddish mixes German and Hebrew. She asked if anyone was familiar with language, and my photographer and I raised our hands. She sang a bit to demonstrate the language.

The set included another cover, John Martyn’s “Don’t Want To Know,” from his 1972 album Solid Air. KT finished the set with her biggest hit, “Suddenly I See,” and pitched her tote bags that say, “It’s by KT Tunstall, bitches!” That pokes fun about how that song go so big that people who had no idea it was hers knew it.

For her encore, she brought Martin back out, and they ended with a couple of folks songs: “This Little Light of Mine” and “You Are My Sunshine.” 

This was my first time seeing both artists, and they were a hoot and a delight. KT especially has boatloads of personality and is a lot of fun.

Here are some photos of KT Tunstall and Martin Sexton performing at The Birchmere on May 6, 2023. All pictures copyright and courtesy of Ari Strauss.