By Chris Shuttlesworth
TIMES STAFF WRITER
No, Murray's success leaps directly from her voice, that beautiful alto lilt so often described as "velvety" and "smooth." It's the aural version of a full-body massage.
And although that voice took some time arriving Wednesday night at the Wente Vineyards Estate Winery in Livermore, Murray ended up departing the stage to a well-deserved standing ovation after a 90-minute, 23-song set.
As the sun faded from a cloudy crimson sky, the 51-year-old Canadian singer took to the outdoor stage dressed in white pants and top and a blue jacket. She stood nearly motionless while she sang "Time Don't Run Out on Me" in a hoarse rasp that had many in the audience concerned that months of touring in support of her self-titled latest album had trashed her most treasured instrument.
But over the next half-hour, as she alternated between some of her hits (including "Just Another Woman in Love") and songs from the pop-flavored new album, her voice began to shake off the grit.
She seemed more at ease with the new songs, and she moved energetically around the stage during such throat-loosening numbers as the Bonnie Raitt-esque "Shame on You." In between, she chatted with the audience, even joking about how often she gets mistaken for Helen Reddy ("No, I'm not singing I Am Woman.' ")
By the time she again performed a song while standing still at the mike, the 1979 classic "I Just Fall in Love Again," she was in fine form and ready to segue into the honky tonk-light "That's the Way Love Goes."
It was just in time, too. She and three of seven members of her back-up band pulled up some stools and launched into a five-song acoustic set featuring some audience requests. It served notice Anne Murray Unplugged would make a mighty fine show in itself. "Snowbird" in particular benefited from the spare, three-guitar treatment that stripped some of the bouncy twang off the 27-year-old tune.
Murray estimates she's recorded more than 300 songs in her 29-year, 30-album career, and at times she worked too hard shoehorning them into the show. A medley of songs from her 1993 tribute to singers of the '50s, the commercially overlooked "Croonin'," failed to do more than whet the audience's appetite with snippets from Rosemary Clooney, Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly and Perry Como. The standards deserve to be heard in full, not strung together in a Vegas-style Cuisinart fashion.
By the time Murray bounced around the stage belting out "Daydream Believer," just before ending the regular set with an audience sing-along of "Could I Have This Dance," the early vocal warm-up seemed as though it never happened. As she sang in "Shadows in the Moonlight," the first number of her two-song encore, "You'll be glad you came - wait and see."