“Wake me up when September ends,” is the Green Day line splashed all over FM radio at the moment, and so it is – Happy October. Month of fall, of high school homecomings, of Halloween. We will return just in time to see the leaves begin to change. I will visit my special tree at the University of Maryland, which changes firey and brazen like no other I’ve ever seen, and I’ll have to admit there is no place on Earth where it can be fall forever, and nowhere I can hide from my 25th birthday.
The end of September marks a first for rob and I. I don’t like to tell people how much I make for a living. I find when I do, it goes one of two ways – either it is a badge of honor confirming how little I’ve managed to live off and how frugal I’ve been to accomplish it, or it is to be looked upon with pity. I personally vascillate between those two feelings on the subject. Point being, last month rob and I made the most money we’ve ever made … respectable salaries even. We worked our asses off for it … and then we got lucky. And I think that is what I’ve learned about this trip and this business: I always hated the idea of building a life on luck. I like control and the result of effort and accountability, and there’s something completely out of your hands about luck … but I’m not going to speak badly about it when it’s treated me kindly. Sometimes you just have to take luck the way a frustratingly modest person eventually takes a compliment. (little rob note: NICE line Heather!)
Open mics are a lot about luck, and last night we had the good fortune to wander into a really pleasant one at the Pheasant Creek Coffeehouse. With the close of the Six String Cafe, a more southern sister to Jammin Java in Vienna, VA, the local musician refugees have been scattered to the North Carolina winds and wandered into places like Pheasant Creek to find their new open mic home. Hosted by the North Carolina Songwriter’s Co-op, we sipped on chocolatey mochas and iced ginger lime teas while waiting for the night to get started with the entrance of host, Dana. After he opened up the night, we were first up, and I was pleasantly surprised when, as I started unsheathing the drum, an obvious light bulb went off over one of the audience members’ heads.
Jamie Purnell had seen us compete as semifinalists at the Mountain Stage Newsong Festival in West Virginia this year, where he had competed in one of the early morning rounds. He also is friendly with Susquehanna Music and Arts Fest winner Zoe Mulford and Carrboro local Jonathan Byrd, and pretty much knew every festival, musician and what-have-you we’ve ever encountered. It’s a ridiculously small world. Jamie’s voice reminds me of Vince Gill, and he knows how to play Richard Shindell songs – I thought rob was going to fall over when Jamie broke into “Transit.” We three closed the coffeeshop long after the open mic had ended, along with Jamie’s friend Dan Tan who also performed at the open mic, and who introduced Rob and I to “Stay In Tune” strings.
Good voices in the open mic – that is something that relies heavily on luck. You never know what you’re going to get, but last night was a good smathering of bluegrass twang from Bo Porter (who split his time between Alaska and North Carolina, lamented that he couldn’t find hairspray to get his very long hair into a suitable pompadore, wielded a guitar signed by none other than Merle Haggard and sang a song containing the line “gotta be jelly cause jam don’t shake like that”), smooth pop/folk/jazziness from Jamie, pop/emo from Dan, and a song called “I’m Not Gay” from a traveling duo who’s lead singer apparently had “a quality.”
It was a warm place. The blue-eyed girl working the counter came over to tell me how wonderfully unique she thought my voice was, which is the best compliment as far as I’m concerned. I often feel like I am still finding my voice. Another great compliment was that we were also joined by Katy, a fan who caught us at the Six String Cafe a long while back and has been jonesing to see us ever since. It’s nice when people like you so much they bring a parent, too.
Tonight is the house concert, and I have to admit, I’m a little nervous. We haven’t really done this sort of thing before, and I remember the way the big house concert hosts looked at us at Kerrville. What makes this different is that these people put tonight together completely because they wanted their friends to see US, the us they saw that night we played Caffe Driade and were very much being ourselves. So I figure we just keep right on being ourselves and see what happens.
