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“The Dead of the Night” is a lustrous, yearning if lyrically overheated song depicting musical creation as a sacrament (in concert, the luster and yearning prevailed). She encored strongly with three songs about her own enterprise as an artist.

“Round of Blues,” a fetching tune that wouldn’t be unworthy of Colvin’s key influence, Joni Mitchell, evokes a woman’s emotional high-wire walk as she pursues a relationship that’s both promising and fraught with the danger of rejection. “Polaroids,” her best-developed lyric, does manage to wrap some narrative flesh around the emotional bones of a dashed love affair. Colvin brought out the song’s combination of zest and tension with muscular bass-note momentum on guitar and with Bonnie Raitt-style husky-bluesy touches that offset her normally airy, clear voice. “Tennessee” (not the acclaimed rap hit by Arrested Development) depicts a Yankee songwriter (Colvin grew up in South Dakota and Illinois and is based in New York City) seeking vibrancy in Southern roots-rock, but it also acknowledges some friction in the encounter between Southern sensibilities and her own. Colvin did hint, in her better moments, at a less solipsistic songwriting self that would like to engage the world around her but hasn’t quite found the means. “Fat City,” with its more deeply probing material, is an improvement over “Steady On” which featured some memorable melodies saddled with one-dimensional lyrics and generically gleaming contemporary-folk production. That would have involved introducing an important character other than Colvin herself, and we couldn’t have that, could we? It was telling that, after Colvin let it slip that she is engaged to be married, the round of questions from the crowd concerned what she is going to wear at the wedding, what music she wants to have played-everything but questions about whom she is marrying. But her lengthy session with the printouts merely proved that Sartre had it wrong: Hell, in fact, is listening to other people’s slavishly admiring fan mail-unless you happen to be a slavishly admiring fan, as most of the 400 or so people in the house obviously were. It could have been fun if those notes had sassed Colvin a little.

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And she pulled out a thick sheaf of computer printouts that someone in the house had give her, full of doting messages transmitted among a network of fans interconnected by modems.

She talked airily about what a dull disappointment the Clinton inaugural, where she performed at one of the balls, turned out to be for her. But while she indeed was wry and amiable, her chat was about nothing very interesting, and about nothing but herself. Like most folkies whose material is unrelievedly earnest, Colvin has learned to leaven her shows with wry, amiable chat. They’re barely pronouns, invisible adjuncts to Colvin’s dominating “I.” They aren’t recognizable people they exist only by implication. But feelings arise from our contact with others, and the others in Colvin’s songs (usually lovers in relationships failed or, less frequently, hopeful) are given no words, no traits, virtually no identities. Colvin came off as a woman of feeling who can convey feelings that are fundamental.

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