When Melanie Dekker began her set at Kirk Avenue Music Hall Wednesday evening, she announced that  she was going to dedicate a song to the first person who greeted her on the streets of Roanoke. Then she was going to dedicate a song to Gary Jackson, the man without whom the Music Hall would not exist. “Can we all have a song?” someone called out from the crowd.

Dekker paused, counted the bodies in the chairs in front of her, and said, “Yes, you can all have a song.” And so, before the evening was done, each member of the audience—including the bartender—heard a song sung in his or her honor. There were only 22 of us and Dekker chatted with everybody in the place and worked some of their names into her songs. They were nice songs, too.

There was the one that grew out of a rainy trip to Nashville. The one built around a line from Shakespeare. The one she wrote for her mama. The one that won her a medal from the Canadian government. Dekker wrote everything except the Rickie Lee Jones cover, and everything sounded like a love song.

“Just about everything gets me to write a love song,” Dekker said.

You know what? That’s OK. Even for a guy who really likes the dark and twisted humor common to Randy Newman and Warren Zevon lyrics, an evening of Dekker and her guitar and her marvelous voice—that sweet, sometimes high, sometimes husky voice—is an evening well spent.

Between songs, the Vancouver singer-songwriter talked about her recent European tour and Christmas in Afghanistan and doing 11 shows in 24 hours and being in a submerged Nashville and how she got that medal. But I’m not going to tell you about any of that. Dekker said she plans to come back to Kirk Avenue next year. Maybe she’ll tell you about it then.

“It’s been great to meet you all,” Dekker said when her show ended. “Literally.”

It was pretty cool to meet her, too. You should do that some time.

Tim Thornton is a writer, musician, and all-around swell guy.