Thompson - Refined but not rarifed.

In 1999, Playboy Magazine asked musicians to submit "Best Songs of the Millennium" lists. Both an exceptional musical scholar and smart-ass, Richard Thompson turned in a literal 1,000-year list. Playboy's editors were not amused and Thompson's list went unpublished. Still excited about the songs, Thompson developed related concerts, but not as a formal tour. Thompson regularly plays Northeast Ohio, and he's been doing these 1,000 Years of Popular Music shows throughout this entire decade, but Thompson had never presented his millennium-pop project here. Thompson's way overdue 1,000 Years local debut finally happens Monday at the Kent Stage.

In recent years, Thompson released two 1,000 Years of Popular Music concert recordings: a DVD/CD boxed set and a separate CD sold only through concerts and his Web site. The two releases each contain several songs that the other doesn't, but even combined, they aren't an exhaustive representation of Thompson's Popular Music repertoire. The discs balance a sincere reverence for the source material with a skillful playfulness, avoiding getting overly precious or stuffy, yet maintaining a serious depth.

In a phone interview, Thompson acknowledged the all-too-easy trap of music snobbery.

"Yes, there is snobbery in all areas of music," Thompson says, "certainly in the classical and opera world. It's a refined sort of rarified air that they breathe. I think because they're so disconnected from the rest of music that when they try to stray outside of the classical world, they fall totally headfirst into the puddle. When you hear operatic versions of folk songs or popular songs, you realize that these people just have no idea at all how to deal with anything outside of that [classical] world. They shouldn't actually attempt it. It's easier to go the other way, to sing sort of a gruff, half-spoken, half-sung version of an operatic aria and get away with it, because you aren't in such a refined, pretentious stylistic area."

The 1,000 Years live band is a multi-instrumental trio with Thompson backed by Judith Owen and percussionist Debra Dobkin. Thompson explains how the makeup of the band dictates the songs' personalities.

"There are only three of us and we have a very limited armory of instruments, so everything gets smaller, everything is reduced," he says. "And so, opera is reduced and popular music is rethought and revamped. And early music is performed very much in the way we want to do it, rather than a sort of 'received wisdom' way of doing it. Most of the people who performed early music were classically trained musicians, and they give it this rather conservative, conservatory air; whereas I think it's a lot funkier than that, and we're happy to play things crude. Generally, we're out to enjoy ourselves at the cost of any musical style."

And yet, the real point of the show is to reveal "interesting songs," as Thompson puts it.

"Sometimes it's to reveal songs that are unknown because they're historically obscure, and sometimes to reveal songs in genres that people wouldn't necessarily listen to," he explains. "So to do something operatic to a pop audience, they might be hearing something in a way they've never heard it before."

Contextualizing 16th-century madrigals with the Kinks and Squeeze, Thompson also curiously reveals his own distinctive artistic identity across these songs' musical and lyrical themes. (For fun, connect the dots between the Easybeats' "Friday on My Mind" and Thompson's own "I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight.")

In the live recordings noted above, Thompson takes such strong ownership of these cover tunes that you'd swear he wrote some of them himself. Thompson miraculously extracts unimaginable depth and substance out of Britney Spears' "Oops, I Did It Again" by giving it a straight treatment consistent with Thompson's own songwriting.

"Even though the audience is kind of laughing, certainly for the first 30 seconds, I think at some point the audience realizes it's actually not a bad song if you just tweak it a bit," Thompson says of the Spears tune. "If you take it out of its original context, which might be considered fairly bland, it's actually a very well-constructed pop song. And well, y'know, this whole show is about well-constructed pop songs."

Richard Thompson's
1,000 Years Of Popular Music
7 p.m. Monday, Feb. 4
Kent Stage
175 E. Main St., Kent
330.677.5005
Tickets: $30 advance, $35 day of show