Ware sounds frequent on Garrison Avenue

Ware Wednesday is canceled this week. Instead, it’ll be Ware Friday.

Local singer-songwriter Tom Ware, one leg of the Tom Ware Trio, has forgone the ensemble’s regular midweek gig at Old Town Grain & Feed for a set at R. Landry’s New Orleans Café, a block away on Garrison Avenue in Fort Smith.

He’ll be joined by singer Lacey Thomas. Showtime is 7 p.m.

Ware customarily plays with his son, bassist Anthony Ware, and longtime friend, drummer Dale Fraze. They all pitch in on the vocals. The popular trio, a favorite on hump day at Old Town, invites fans into a realm of recollections and reflections intended to get their internal psychic gyroscope positively rotating for the weekend.

But that’s Ware Wednesday. The topic at hand is Ware Friday.

Ware has played on Garrison Avenue, specifically at Old Town, for the better part of 35 years, since he was a teenager. Yet he’s only started to play his own material in the last two to three years. Things changed five years ago, when Ware turned 50. He then put together material for his “Time Warp” CD — it was his stepping out to put his own message across.

What motivates him to play the Garrison Avenue joints as long as he has?

“It’s the positive response that I got from the audience to my original songs,” says Ware. The audience reception of his unique message is evident at his gigs.

Ware’s setlist includes an impressive collection of original songs — thoughtful meditations on personal plights and societal contexts — such as “My Electric Guitar,” “Voices in My Head,” “Ain’t Life A Bitch” and “For a Reason. On these songs and others, the ins and outs and ups and downs of self-clarification are processed and reconciled with incisive lyrics and melodic memories.

Ware’s humor shines in “Permanent Haze,” “Ten Feet Tall and Growin’” and “Animal Farm” — songs that both tickle the funny bone and inspire a bad case of the munchies. More close to home, Ware’s “Bob Burns” pays tribute to the musical bazooka Burns created. While a historical anachronism, “Bob Burns” is a delightful song that gives due tribute to Van Buren’s own and little known ingenious inventor.

Ware does TS Elliot proud in “Wandering in The Wasteland,” his meditation on the technological hopelessness that Robert Pirsig cautioned us against in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” This song takes listeners trippin’ down memory lane with a psychedelic groove that simultaneously captures the ennui of technological mediocrity and the sedative acceptance of a commercially induced fate.

Ware’s music is not without a nod to salvation. “When I Think of You,” “Dust and Bone” and “Not for Nothing” are reflective reassurances of life’s good lessons and the perseverance of such.

The Tom Ware Trio’s groovy vibe is crafted from years of experience of life and rhymes. The net result is a mergence of voices and tones that echo a range of artists from Bruce Springsteen to Ralph Stanley laced with a psychedelic dose of ethereal lounge rhythms.

From the first notes, the music takes concertgoers under a spell and carries them to an imagined world that has been and that can be again.