Brooklyn singer-songwriter Kevin Devine plays tonight at Soho in Santa Barbara.  To get a feel for him, check out his recent winning cover of Pavement’s Summer Babe for the 405 Summer Series.  You can pick up tickets for the show at Club Mercy.

Devine had this explanation as to why he chose this song for 405:

“I saw Pavement with my first ever girlfriend at my second ever concert in the summer of 1995, outdoors, and they opened with this,” he said.

“There’s something about the looseness of this song, its slack nostalgia, that I associate with long, lazy summer days outside, with a girl, being charmed & charming.”

The lyrics are, in Pavement style, pretty much inscrutable wordfun collage, but their, his; magic trick was the way he breaks from the winking to invest, through inflection, such feeling, yearning even, in certain phrases (“I’ll be waiting forever, I’m waiting (x8)…” & “I’ve got a lot of things I want to sell, but not here, babe – torture!”).

“It’s a truly lovely & lived-in memory, no Instagram filter required.”