5/4/08 Mason Jennings @ City Hall, Nashville, Tenn.

Mason Jennings and his music are full of contradictions. He is laid back and intense, drawn to faith but nagged by doubt, peaceful but angry, clearly passionate about his craft but aware that’s he’s just a guy with a guitar, distant but engaging, happy-go-lucky but shouldering a burden. Perhaps his broad range is part of his appeal-and nowhere is the Minnesota-based singer/songwriter more captivating than in his live show.

The fullness of Nashville’s cavernous City Hall at 9 o’clock on a Sunday night testifies to his subtle ability to connect with his fans. Over the course of the show, Jennings scarcely interacted with the crowd; but dammit if the kids didn’t love him anyhow. Watching him on stage, it’s hard not too. There’s no telling how conscious he is about his stage presence, but in his suit vest thrown over a drab button-down shirt, curly hair swept back from his forehead, he looked like a mysterious southern con-man sprung from the imaginations of the Coen brothers. Gripping his Martin like a shotgun, he stared down the microphone into the crowd with a slow-burning ease and intensity. He seemed a bit more tired and reserved than my last encounter with him (Exit/In, 2006), but if so, his performance was not less enjoyable.

Jennings opened with the driving “Soldier Boy” from his forthcoming album In the Ever, before downshifting to the more mellow, more familiar “Darkness Between the Fireflies.” By the fourth song in his hour-long set, “Bullet,” he had the mixed crowd of fratty young adults, the usual Nashville hipsters, neo-hippies and even a few older folks singing along. Jennings played the majority of the set backed by his bassist and drummer, but they left the stage briefly for “Your New Man” and “Adrian.” The former is another newly recorded song, but really only works in a live setting (notably, it is presented as a live recording on In the Ever). A joke song in the tradition of Cash’s “Boy Named Sue,” “Your New Man” got all the appropriate chuckles and hoots from the audience, even if it’s less artful than most of Jennings’s other material.

The last three songs of the regular set (ending on “Butterfly”) demonstrated the pop-rock element of Jennings’s sound. Interestingly, he isn’t one of those players who brings an arsenal of guitars with him. When he needs to dirty things up, he distorts his acoustic Martin D2 for electric guitar tones that sound as rocking as any Telecaster. The upbeat closers left the crowd wanting more, so Mason and his crew obliged with two additional songs, “If You Need a Reason” and “Jackson Square” (with Jennings on both harmonica and guitar ). “Jackson Square” was chillingly good, and more powerful than the already excellent studio version from the Boneclouds album of 2006.

If only the evening had ended there. The show’s self-absorbed headliner Brent Dennen wasted little time in turning City Hall back into a nearly empty room well before the close of his longish set. No doubt Jennings will find a more appropriate partner in Jack Johnson, whose tour he joins later this summer.