The delicacy wisely offsets her more heavy-handed lyrics, and it draws listeners closer to what she does best: morose love songs like "Sing for You" and "Thinking of You".
On Monday night she started her first of two sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden singing behind a scrim while casting a larger-than-life silhouette: a perfect reflection of the way she uses veiled tones and shadowy hints to draw listeners closer.
On her albums — "Marry Me" (Beggars Banquet), from 2007, and "Actor" (Beggars/4AD), released last year — Ms. Clark often courts the private intensity of a bedroom recording, drawing a listener close (but not too close).
And even small touches, like Mr. Ax's sharp accenting in No. 4, seemed to pull the listener closer than usual to the heart of this vital music.
They all offered thoughts, like the idea of moving an instruction to the listener closer to the beginning of the episode, to heighten the mystery.
Behind the air of fragility is the serene confidence of a singer who knows the power of reticence to draw a listener closer.
The presenters I meet are a preternaturally smiley bunch – they've drunk the LBC Kool-Aid – but their emotions, rather like those of their listeners, are close to the surface.
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Beyond the ring of listeners up close, the din kept up, as people tuned in for a moment or two, and then, perhaps in disbelief that such a party, in Hollywood, in 2017, had been taken over by a white guy with an acoustic guitar, began to feel free to ignore him.
