Back from the Susquehanna Music and Arts Festival and leaving for the second leg of the trip today.
The contest went well. I never expected to win anything, but I wanted to make a good showing and really feel like I belonged there and did not stick out as the weakest link, which is a complex I frequently have. I think I’ve figured it out: I’m the singer-songwriter equivalent of an anorexic. I look into my musical mirror and see a fat girl no matter how fit my body of work, and despite the compliments and earnest reassurances of others.
Steve Key and Pat Klink and other people I really respect said afterwards that they and other people felt I sounded the best they had ever heard me, and to some extent, I would agree and actually embrace the compliment.
Rob took third, and Zoe Mulford won, both exactly as I predicted and really hoped. Her songs are some of the best crafted around, and she truly deserved to win based on those merits. I was really proud of rob. My disappointment was minimal, but I felt good about the contest, and accomplished what I set out to.
Rob opted to duck out early and take a couple days off to breathe and have a vacation. So I stuck around to play some song circles, which were pretty good. The main stage performers even wandered down to these things and played with the average joes like me. It was a little intimidating, I gotta admit. But I heard some great people, and I got to hear Brian Gundersdorf do “Amen.” “I always have the grilled cheese, but I always have the crisis,” indeed.
I also previewed a new song, still in progress … a sort of present to Ray for sticking around and carrying my stuff and making sure that I found the cabin in the dark okay, the batteries to my flashlight having died minutes after my parents’ departure with rob in tow. An interesting side note on the flashlight – it was the maglight that was left in my mother’s trunk exactly one year ago when we shifted all the gear from my destroyed car to hers the day of the accident. And we took it out a year later at the festival we were trying to get to all along in the first place.
After a Friday night spent in a freezing-cold cabin (which was so bitter I could not fall asleep until the temperature crept up come morning and allowed me to unfurl out of my tightly packed fetus position and stiffening joints), I got up early the next day to see Ember Swift’s set. I loved watching her do her thing for the folkies. I saw all kinds of new people, too.
Here is the lesson I learned about folk festivals: Everyone looks anonymous. Even with noteriety, our names aren’t always recognizable. It’s our songs that are our faces, our reputations. I stood in line next to a guy who has won every contest around, a couple of times apiece, and had no idea until I saw him on the main stage later that day. The major acts from Saturday night got off-stage and sat down next to me and behind me. I got introduced to Dar Williams and shook her hand while I walked some of my stuff out to my car, and she was just this girl. I could have sat next to her in a college class.
And right now she is probably playing with one of my picks. She got up on stage and lost her pick after one of the first songs. She was a little flustered because she said she knew she was going to do something like that knowing she only had one. Someone pointed out to her that she was in a room full of guitar players, but she said she used a specific kind – skinny red ones with a grip thing – and sure enough, I reached into my bag and the first one I pulled out fit the bill. I walked up to the front and handed it to David Jacobs-Strain, this amazing (and impossibly cute) 20-year-old guitar player who played earlier. He looked it over, agreed it was the right kind and asked the stage manager if he could take it up to her, which he did. So yay for my subtle involvement in Dar Williams’ set.
And though most of Dar’s set really didn’t do anything for me, when she sang the song “February,” I was a mess. Crying along with the Dar die-hards sitting next to me who cried at EVERYTHING.
My find of the day was a woman named Kristina Olsen (www.kristinaolsen.net). After two days of acoustic guitar and singer-songwriters, her wit and slightly raunchy sexuality shocked me into complete attention. She was just this typical older woman, but she was so sensual … every song was laced with it. She hooked me when she began, in a slightly husky voice, telling the story of her brief foray into the college world and a nude drawing class that she took. She said it was weeks and weeks of women, of all shapes and sizes, all entering the room in silken chinese robes they would slip off. And she said whether these women were round, or bony, or muscular, each of them shared the uncanny ability to sit still for three hours while they were being drawn. And she said they were all beautiful in their own way.
And so the parade of women continued for weeks until finally, a man came in.
The way she told the story was so lush and seductive and loving of male sexuality, as she described him, dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a beaten-to-hell white t-shirt. And he slipped off the t-shirt, and she stared, gaping waiting, and he started to unzip his blue jeans …. and she had never in her life ever seen anyone undress … so …. slowly.
And just at that moment, the fire alarm went off and they all had to evacuate the building!
And there were never any more men. The parade of women began again. And she sat next to me when she got done with her set, and I told her how she had taken me in unlike anyone else I’d seen that day.
I had a good time. The cold maybe the only thing that made me unhappy. I wrote a LOT, felt lyrically inspired, but definitely was feeling the pain on the guitar skills. I have work to do – THAT’S what I felt when I drove home early Sunday morning to wish my mother a happy day.
Now it’s on to a month and a half of travel, my brief reprieve at home not a break as much as a refueling and resupplying stop, which I am a little bitter about. But there is beautiful country ahead of me, and as Emily Saliers says, there’s something ’bout the southland in the springtime.
