Singer-songwriter Margaret Glaspy came to Brighton Music Hall on September 25 with her I Am Both tour, performing her fourth studio album.

The concert was a particularly intimate affair. Fellow singer-songwriter Anna Tivel opened with a solo acoustic performance that foreshadowed a similarly Spartan headline set from Margaret Glaspy. The audience maintained a reverent quiet during the performances but thankfully vocalized their appreciation when appropriate.

Glaspy, a seasoned veteran of live performance, comfortably commanded the stage without the backing band she last toured with on her Echo The Diamond tour. She performed nearly all of I Am Both alongside covers of Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Lauryn Hill, Sarah Siskind, and Neil Young in lieu of her older original work. Only reworked versions of “Emotions and Math” and “Somebody to Anybody” from her debut album and “Irish Goodbye” from Echo The Diamond made it into the set.  The culling was in service of a narrative. Glaspy used her set to weave a biographical tapestry of a woman moving through life, introducing most songs with their relation to that story. “Now she’s learning about danger,” Glaspy stated before lunging into a performance of “Sharp Knife,” “Maybe love is going sideways,” she posited before the start of “James and Marie.”

The end came too soon. Margaret Glaspy quipped, “I could do this for about five more hours, but societal protocols say I should do 90 minutes.” With that remark and the encore, the story was over by 10:30.