ONE HELL OF A NIGHT
I can’t express how grateful I am to all of y’all for showing up at Pearl’s Books on December 4th for our little night of ghosts stories and folk music. I’ve mused about it before (but never on this blog, so get ready for a rerun) but a lot of my actual work-life is pretty hermetic. Very easy to see it as existing in a vacuum. Which has it’s toll, especially when you are a pretty social guy with ascetic passion projects. Needless to say, I go into a public reading with the presumption of six people showing up and not a packed house. So seeing a standing room only crowd some already holding copies of Backwood Folk #1 is surreal beyond measure. For my ego’s sake, I can only presume the rest were there for the music.
But what music. I actually only met Christopher Felton in the prep for this event! Specifically we met on the radio for an Ozarks at Large segment on KUAF advertising the night, but we’ve circled each other’s orbits for something like 15 years. It’s a small region after all. Suffice to say I think we made a great match for New Ozark Ghosts. His inaugural performance with The Back Alley Orchestra was a sight to behold, and sounds to die for. It’s a scary thing starting new artistic endeavors in a region that slowly has strangled out most of it’s creative outlets. As with a lot of Fayetteville events recently it happened in the tenor of a celebration and a eulogy. Though I suppose those do intersect a lot.
But that’s a big reason to be thankful for Pearl’s. Still holding out a space for weird artists and writers to warble out the contents of their heads.
Thank you all again. It truly means the world.