November 15th, 2022. Recovery.

NERFA was a good time had – and we played lots – or at least ENOUGH. And I took in a lot of music and a little bit of knowledge to boot. Once I’d relaxed into Kristen’s philosophy on the weekend – that we should be glad to just be doing anything DIFFERENT, the whole thing was a LOT less stressful and even… *gasp* fun!

I’m having a slow recovery from NERFA. Brain is slow moving, body is slow moving. My memory is scattered and my eyes are heavy. I’d looked forward to sleeping in Monday morning, but I couldn’t. LOTS of Zoom meetings and phone calls to catch up with all the people who’d NEEDED to be in touch this past weekend. I’d wanted to sleep in this morning, but I had to get up and do an Adobe Premiere tutorial at Sandy Spring Museum. The world just never stops. Not that I’m desperately in need of a break… but… I could USE a break.

But I should make an effort to parse and understand what I came away with – there was a lot of weekend to my weekend, a lot of NERFA to my NERFA, and the strange emotional highs and lows that come with being exposed to great art while also being made vulnerable by exhaustion.

The last night at NERFA I found myself in a tiny corner room with a sparse audience watching Arielle of Girl Blue (Arielle aka Girl Blue? Never quite sure how to deal with stage names) playing her heart out in a way that reminded me of the best NERFA – and indeed the best festival – moments. Where your guard is down and you’re VULNERABLE and you’re no longer there for the connections and the opportunities and the social bullshit – you’re playing a song and you’re tired and you’re exhausted and it’s all out there on the surface. This was perhaps my favourite moment of the conference – and her song Nashville did me HARM in the best way possible. It reminded me of meeting Rebecca Loebe for the first, and probably only, time. Here was a Folk Star – a woman who’d had her moment in prime time too – being absolutely honest here at 2am in a hotel bedroom. Voice imperfect and cracking from use. I’ve never seen anyone channel that level of honesty on stage, so I feel lucky to have been there.

A new-to-me artist, Arielle, actually sort of hit the nail on the head with her last set – beyond the spectacular intensity of the performance – talking about how exhaustion had put her in this strange dream-state, kind of like she had been drugged. I went through some real peaks and troughs of euphoria and depression. Her performance late on Saturday night / Sunday morning was a high / low point of all those extremes and through tears I realized that was going to be my last NERFA performance of the weekend – that it was time to call it a night – because sometimes it IS possible to curate a perfect moment…

Ocean walks, French fries, throbbing bass, red-raw hatred, anger, sadness and loss. Playing till your fingers hurt and beyond. Seeing long-lost friends both triumphant and failed. Perfect sound. Terrible sound. Architectural ruins, architectural whimsy. Sand and rain and sun. Feeling like I know everything there is to know and feeling absolutely John Snow. Feeling full. Feeling empty.

Yeah. NERFA had it all.

Within the context of the Journal I’m never quite sure how to order such things – because right now I’m dealing with the aftermath, and in a bit I’ll use the photos and a schedule to piece the event back together. Do I date them by the chronology? Or date them by my understanding of it all?

I’ll probably fall back on chronology, but I’ll probably publish them out of order starting with a photodump. Bear with me friends.