Ani DiFranco. Saw her at a concert hall downtown. The audience was predominantly swooning adolescent girls, who were so self-absorbed in their rapture that it wasn't much fun to be in the audience but not on their trip. Perhaps Ani felt the same, because she ended a very tight, pleasent set in about 70 minutes, including the brief encore. Opening act Andrew Bird was entrancing but hard to hear over the hubbub.

David Byrne. At Humpries, an out-door venue in the San Diego Bay. Both intimate and cramped, with a criminal shortage of bathrooms. The opening act was lousy and featured a spastic dancer on stage; they were deservedly ignored. Later, doing something with a catchy latin beat and Spanish lyrics, Bryne had the whole audience eating out of his palm with the slightest of shimmys and rump twists. He is a truly incandescent musician, and at his best sings about life's bitterness with optimism shining through the cracks.

On the minus side, the second half of the show was very heavy on Talking Heads hits, and the guest Extra Action Marching Band, though as engaging and talented a bunch of degenerate San Francisco street musicians as you could hope to find, was more a distraction than an enhancement, especially as they played to the end and then did the encore in lieu of Byrne.

Indigo Girls, at Humpries. A perfectly nice retrospective show, mostly stripped down to the two of them with guitars or banjos and still producing, especially in numbers like Chickenman, plenty of racket. A few songs from almost every album, going way back, and a mix of warhorses and less common songs. Each did one solo performance, and these really highlighted Emily's unfortunate tendency to put words into the lyrics and bend them to the melody and rhythm without any regard for their natural meter, and in contrast Amy's sharp-as-a-tack knack for the beat. I could easily go a decade without hearing Galileo or Closer to Fine again live, but then this was my nth IG show.

Steve Earle at the Belly Up, a club in Solana Beach. He looks old and shrunken and pained, plays as hard as ever (I would guess, never having seen him play while young and coked up), sounds ragged yet tuneful, and flirted discomfitingly with the saucy young opening singer. His fervent political and social positions, though well-aligned with mine, were hard to swallon in the fresh despair of January 2005. He's been around long enough and faced enough hardship that I would have preferred some more comforting elder wisdom about hanging in there in dark times instead of a song with the hollow chorus, "the revolution starts now" when it very obviously doesn't. I was glad to finally see him play in person, and enjoyed it, but it was an uncomfortable show.

Gomez at the Belly Up. Saw them twice. Musically excellent, but their songs are mismashes that with jarring stylistic jumps every few bars. Whenever they start to build a groove, they abandon it for something less promising. Live, they still manage to pull it off with drunken charisma. The patrons of the Belly Up, however, are drunken but devoid of charisma, and if you aren't there early enough to get a seat, it's a bad place to catch a show sober.