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NERFA is a weird experience. You pack a couple of hundred musicians in various places in their careers into a couple of floors in a quirky, off-season resort hotel, keep them up till 4am, wake them up at 7am, and see what happens. People write and cry and think about what they're doing with their Lives. We learn and forget ourselves and eat bad food till someone discovers where the GOOD food is and then we all descend upon it.
There is judgement about the coffee.
And there are these musical epiphanies - these moments of perfection heightened exquisitely by fatigue poisons and the drug-highs of exhaustion, both for the audience who is vulnerable and the performer who is also vulnerable.
And so - I'm not saying Girl Blue, who we're playing with one week from today at Sandy Spring Museum, is the best artist I saw at NERFA this past year. And I'm not necessarily saying she gave me all the same emotions that I received upon seeing Ani Difranco perform the first time as an impressionable 20-something dreamer. And I'm certainly not going to admit to having wrapped one arm around Matt Nakoa and one arm around Connor Garvey and wept openly on a couch in a hotel room at 3am on the Jersey Shore.
But that's sure as Hell how I remember it.
So don't miss this show.
Monday March 13th at Sandy Spring Museum.
ilyAIMY and Girl Blue. 7pm. $25. Tickets at
sandyspringmuseum.salsalabs.org/girlblue/index.html |
