John Hiatt Feted by Los Lobos, Other Americana Artists at Troubadour

“Let’s go to WeHo in the meantime” doesn’t have the same ring to it, but legendary singer-songwriter and longtime Tennessean resident John Hiatt returned to his old haunts in L.A. to be serenaded by a parade of boldface admirers Saturday at a benefit show at the Troubadour. The combination of classic material and an A-list of artists from multiple generations would have been enough to melt anyone’s icy blue heart, even the chilly woman who was the subject of the old Hiatt ballad of that name.

The occasion was the Americana Music Association‘s pre-Grammy celebration. (Can we call it a pre-Grammy gala? No, legally, probably not.) For most of the last 13 years the event has taken place at the Troubadour on the eve of Music’s Biggest Night, offering an annual chance to experience what is arguably the L.A. music scene’s most bodacious night, in the form of a tribute to a legend in the wide-open field of what is loosely qualified as American roots music. The Hiatt salute followed in the tradition of one given in honor of Paul Simon in 2024 and shows celebrating the music of Willie Nelson, John Prine, Loretta Lynn, Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris and other luminaries in the years prior to that. Occasionally, as in the case of the late Prine, the artist will come and wrap up the evening himself, as Hiatt did in this exemplary instance.

The most predictable Hiatt song for anyone to cover is the circa-1987 ballad “Have a Little Faith in Me,” and as phenomenal and potentially moving a song as it is, even somebody who appreciates Hiatt as much as I do has been known to zone out a little when someone announces that they’re about to do it. In the wrong hands, it can just take on that overdone wedding-song quality. So I’m happy to report that Michael McDonald‘s hands are not the wrong ones. The once-and-future Doobie sat down at an electric keyboard to sing the number solo, sans the house band, and it was transfixing from moment one, as McDonald applied that not-quite-earthly, benevolent-alien voice to Hiatt’s most famous redemption anthem, throwing in a long gospel-piano outro that really made it feel like a faith-based song.

(And just to reinforce that he had been through his own redemption arc, akin to the one Hiatt alluded to in one of his earliest sobriety-era tunes, McDonald explained to the audience how it was his first time on the Troubadour stage since 1972, and the last time, he’d had to get bailed out of the Van Nuys jail to make it to the gig.)

Even with McDonald being a standout among standouts, faith that everyone on the bill would get a chance to shine was amply rewarded. The performances kicked off with another instance of the house band not being present on stage, in this case so that the full lineup of Little Feat could commence proceedings with “Slow Turning,” the title track of Hiatt’s “Bring the Family” followup in the late ’80s. There was a corresponding bookend moment near the end of the show when the house band gave way to Los Lobos, who performed one of their own songs, “Down on the Riverbed,” but not randomly — this was a track of theirs that originally featured a distinctive, echoing Hiatt b.g. vocal. (“Steve said I’d be sick of my own songs by now,” Hiatt quipped, by way of explaining his eagerness to jump back onto one of somebody else’s.)

Hiatt has played with some guitar heroes in his time, like a noted association with Ry Cooder, so it was fitting when acoustic instruments got put away on a few occasions to go for something that would set off the decibel warnings on attendees’ Apple watches. One such moment came when Tom Morello, of Rage fame, did a version of the ballad “The River Knows Your Name” that not only ended with extensive soloing but with Morello doing a good few bars of that soloing with his teeth — no false modesty in this crowd-pleasing moment. That followed a similarly electrifying performance by Joe Bonamassa, who did the seasoned electric guitar player’s national anthem, “Perfectly Good Guitar,” peeling off solos soulful enough that it really did seem blasphemous to imagine harm coming to his instrument. (In good fun, he mimed as if he were about to do something smashing at the end, as if.)

Hiatt has increasingly turned toward an acoustic blues feel in some of his latter-day albums, so when bluesman Cedric Burnside took to the stage, you might’ve assumed that he would be covering a song that already leaned that way a little. Instead, Burnside undertook the night’s most radical exercise in transformation, turning the ’80s heartbreaker “Icy Blue Heart” inside out and removing most traces of the melody, till it sounded like something that might have been picked up on a field recording in the 1930s. It felt like watching a magic act. (Burnside might’ve attracted some good karma with his thoughtful treatment of the tune; he won his first Grammy the next day, after playing the Hiatt gig.)

It was instructive seeing some of the great singer-songwriters of our time do their take on Hiatt. Joe Henry went slightly afield of which choice we might expect him to do by tackling a countrypolitan cheating song, “This is the Way We Make a Broken Heart,” that somehow Hiatt never officially released himself but became a No. 1 country song for Rosanne Cash in 1987. Lyle Lovett, a contemporary who has done co-headlining tours with Hiatt, brought his Texas lilt to “Train to Birmingham,” a 2011 track. Robbie Fulks ably traced the contours of a “Lipstick Sunset,” a lonesome number lifted from Hiatt’s most famous album, “Bring the Family.”

Many of the performers were near Hiatt’s age or just a little younger, but some represented next-gen fandom. We know that Lilly Hiatt is from the next generation, by virtue of her being the honoree’s daughter; she chose “You Must Go,” a song of her dad’s she’d previously chosen to cover for a Record Store Day 45. Then there was Sarah Jarosz saying that “Drive South” had been a favorite sing-along in the car when she was 7 (which, it might be noted, would have been about a decade after it came out). Later, Jarosz was united with her supergroup, I’m With Her, whose Sara Watkins noted that the number they were doing, “Crossing Muddy Waters,” was one of the first songs they ever did as a harmonizing string-band trio.

Female artists got plenty of chances to add a wail to Hiatt songs where there had not necessarily previously been one Shemekia Copeland nailed a pre-“Bring the Family” song of sensual devotion, “Love Like Blood,” prefacing it with a mention of how she’d run into Hiatt on the sidewalk out front and told him, “You wrote a sexy-ass song.” Judy Blume, a singer from the Netherlands whose debut album was just announced by the Rounder label, introduced her version of “Is Anybody There” by informing Hiatt (who looked on from the balcony) that his song was in the official school curriculum back in her homeland.

And one of the standouts of the night was Nashville-based belter Maggie Rose — who’d just been on stage the previous night downtown, singing the Dead for the MusiCares gala — digging into one of Hiatt’s most groove-alicious tracks, “Riding With the King.” (Unlike the Eric Clapton/BB King cover, she did not bowdlerize the lyrics.) House band member Molly Jenson took the lead on one of Hiatt’s cleverest but still most poignant early tunes, “She Loves the Jerk,” in partnership with keyboardist Phillip Krohnengold, finally turning her part of the duet around to make the third-person first-person, as “I love the jerk.”

For sheer delicacy, meanwhile, there was the always welcome sight and sound of the Milk Carton Kids, covering “One for the One.” “If you do have earplugs in, you won’t need ’em,” the harmony duo quipped. “Take your plugs out and put your hearing aids in. This is gonna be the quietest song of the night.” That was the one, all right.

After his cameo with Los Lobos, Hiatt was joined by the house band for a concluding four of his own, three of them pretty well-known (including the Ry Cooder-recorded cowrite “Across the Borderine”) plus one welcome deeper cut, “The Music Was Hot,” from a more recent album, representing not one of his own personal stories but his imagining of a less than completely fulfilled mother and housewife who lives for WSM.

Had Brandy Clark, who was announced late for the lineup, canceled? No, she hadn’t — she turned up in the clinch to join Hiatt for a closing duet of “Thing Called Love,” representing one of the closer things we’ve got to a rising Bonnie Raitt-style figure at the moment, in her own way. And the cry of love did not sound at all alarming.

The Americana event at the Troubadour always happens to take place the night after the annual MusiCares dinner, which is also a benefit tribute show, and although this one is scaled down by about one-thousand percent from that, intimacy-wise, it’s invariably always at least as strong in content and lineup. It so happened that this year’s Americana event also turned into a MusiCares benefit, with money from both the $200 Troubadour tickets and a pay-what-you-can livestream going to the Recording Academy charity’s fire relief efforts.

Michele Aquilato produced the event, as always, with an assist from Americana Music Association executive director (and the show’s host), Jed Hilly. The unflappable house band, many returning from last year’s Paul Simon tribute, with all the different skillsets that required, included music director Daniel Rhine on bass, Greg Leisz (who was also in the house band at the previous night’s MusiCares blowout) on steel gutiar, Mark Stepro on drums, Jim Oblon on guitar, Sara Watkins on fiddle and vocals, Jenson on vocals and Krohnengold on bass.

The full setlist:

“Slow Turning” — Little Feat
“She Loves the Jerk” — Molly Jenson & Phillip Krohnengold
“Love Like Blood” — Shemekia Copeland
“You Must Go” — Lilly Hiatt
“Is Anybody There” — Judy Blank
“Lipstick Sunset” — Robbie Fulks
“The Way We Make a Broken Heart” — Joe Henry
“Icy Blue Heart” — Cedric Burnside
“Have a Little Faith in Me” — Michael McDonald
“Drive South” — Sarah Jarosz
“Riding With the King” — Maggie Rose
“Perfectly Good Guitar” — Joe Bonamassa
“The River Knows Your Name” — Tom Morello
“Train to Birmingham” — Lyle Lovett
“One for the One” — Milk Carton Kids
“Crossing Muddy Waters” — I’m With Her
“Down on the Riverbed” — Los Lobos with John Hiatt
“Memphis in the Meantime” — John Hiatt
“Across the Borderline” — John Hiatt
“The Music Is Hot” — John Hiatt
“Thing Called Love” — John Hiatt and Brandy Clark