LEAF weekend!

Monday, May 11 2009

As some of you may know, this past weekend was tough competition for the local music scene in Asheville with LEAF going on in Black Mountain and great music happening in town. For us, Saturday night at the garage with the Baker Family Band and Peace Jones was as packed as we’ve ever seen it….
Baker Family Band opened up with an awesome set that fell upon too few ears, but those who were there were on a mission to enjoy the colorful, whirlwind experience BFB had to offer. I know I did! We had a decent set and a great surprise when our friends Neil and Rochelle from Tennessee showed up! Super-fan Susie was there too, and she always makes the crowd look better! After us, Peace Jones set the tone for a dreamy, jammie, dancey night, and what we caught of it was a great mix of all of those things. They even rapped! We had to bounce early, though, because we knew we’d be up at the crack of dawn (like, 10:00am in nyst land) to head to LEAF!
Ours was the 1:00 opening show on the waterfront, which we won our way into by playing on the back of a pickup truck in 20-degree weather in the Asheville Mardi Gras parade. Did I mention that Shane and Jason were both wearing dresses in that parade? They have great legs, so that could have swayed the judging in our favor….
LEAF was beautiful. As my first festival (ever! I know!), I can say that it was packed with positive energy and happy people, and it ran the musical gamut all the way from folk to old time; Latin, jazz, and blues to indie-quirk-pop (shameless plug). Everywhere we looked there was another group of people gathered to play their instruments and sing their stories, and moms and dads got to relax and enjoy while tons of kids ran wild and barefoot over the muddy grounds. One of the highlights of my LEAF experience was, without a doubt, David Wilcox, a local singer/songwriter whom I had not had the pleasure of experiencing live until Sunday at LEAF. Seamless story-telling lead into beautiful, insightful songs that lulled everyone in that steamy-hot barn into a blissful, romantic state of mind that made it easy to sing along when the time came to do so. We missed The Space Heaters (which was a bummer), but we’re trying to get them to play with us at Fred’s Speakeasy on the 23rd (of May), so look out for that! Tired, hot, and sunburned, now you see them piled into our little clown car and headed on home to our tree shack in Oteen.
That night, Jason and I attended our friend Grace’s surprise birthday party in West Asheville. Surprise parties are nerve-wracking, aren’t they? We were so scared that we were going to ruin it somehow! When we arrived, Grace’s roomie came out to tell us to move our car down the street, and that she’d be there any minute. So we rushed down the street, found a good spot, and SPRINTED back to the house, the whole time adrenaline pumping through my heart like I was on CSI or something. It all worked out fine though, and Grace was as happy as could be when she came home to a dark house full of friends ready to attack her...really, she was! It was a lot of fun, and an honor to be among some of Asheville’s finest musicians, like the birthday girl herself (from Silver Dagger), Moses Atwood, Paul Johnson (Johnson’s Crossroad), Taylor Martin, Chris Michael (Tennessee Hollow), Ty Gilpin (High Windy), and Amanda and Pete from The Honeycutters! There were plenty more talented musicians there, but pbr and multiple jams prevented me from either meeting them or maintaining their names. Any way you slice it, it was an awesome weekend, full of nature, music, friends, and new experiences.