Singer / songwriter John Hewitt stopped by the Slice, Thursday, July  21 to play a solid set of mostly original songs  for an intimate audience.

 He brought a ’60s folk singer vibe, dressed like a long lost member of the Band.

 One immediate highlight made me want to go back and  re-read “Tristessa,”  Jack Kerouac’s short novel about morphine addicts in Mexico City as he noted he wrote his song about some of the characters, but put them in Nashville instead of  Mexico City.

“Smoky Mountain Rain” was a highlight. 

He played some pretty fingerpicked guitar and added the occasional harp solo as he crooned his songs interspersed with a few stories. 

 Hewitt played a variety of styles of music with an emphasis on folk music, but he also dabbled in jazz/ ’70s soft rock for “ Too Many People” and some more rock  oriented songs.

He noted he released an album in 2022 and played  several songs from it before playing a cover of “Angel FroM Montgomery” and a n obscure Tom Petty cover “Angel Dream” followed by Petty’s hit “ I Won’t Back Down.”

— by Richard Amery, L.A. Beat Editor