As Madeleine Peyroux has made plain in recent years, small venues feel most like home to her. Peyroux brought her regular guitarist Jon Herington and bassist Barak Mori to a 200-seater 12th-century Oxfordshire church (hence the title) for this recording of classic songs from composers as different as Tom Waits, Allen Toussaint, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and 19th-century American songwriter Stephen Foster. Mori’s big, growling sound and Herington’s gleaming rejoinders and scampering runs surround the singer on Eric Clapton’s Got You on My Mind; she delivers Waits’s Tango Till They’re Sore with a sardonic intimacy, and Townes Van Zandt’s The Highway Kind as an introverted speculation that makes her signature upturns of resolving notes sound as natural as talking. Lee Dorsey’s Everything I Do Gonh Be Funky is a catchily sensuous glide, Peyroux’s own Hello Babe exudes a kind of menacing playfulness, and Patti Smith’s Trampin’ displays the delicate handling of a good lyric Peyroux is famous for. Secular Hymns is very close to the feel of a Peyroux live show, and one in which she’s clearly having a ball.
