Good Day, Sunshine

Since I left things hanging with the Brandi Carlile show, I'll go ahead and say that it was AWESOME. Brandi can sing. I don't think many of the crowd members knew what to expect because she had a bit of a hard time trying to get the audience into it. In a way it was nice because everyone stayed rather quiet, and most people stayed seated. However, there were points where I really wanted to get out of my seat and run down front, but being that we were seated with people on either side of us, I felt it might be a little rude to make them move to let me past. By the time the encore performance came around, though, I had to get up -- especially when Emily Sailers came out to join Brandi on a couple of performances. They sang/played "Cannonball" together, a song on Brandi's new album that the Indigo Girls join her on... Emily also jammed out on the electric guitar during a rendition of "Folsom Prison Blues." Let me just tell you... Brandi can do some Johnny Cash. Brandi also did Radiohead's "Creep" and Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah." I didn't know anyone else could ever come close to singing "Hallelujah" as well as Buckley, but she sure did. And I shouldn't leave out the fact that her band members were pretty darn good themselves -- the twins, Phil and Tim Hanseroth were on bass and guitar, respectively, and also on background vocals, Josh Neumann played the cello, and Matt Chamberlain was on drums. Gibb Droll from the Gibb Droll Band (a band that played in Boone quite often when I was in school at Appalachian State) also joined in on guitar during a few songs.

This weekend has proven to be quite beautiful, but it's flying by. Yesterday Jarrett and I took some time to clean off the patio furniture and the deck, and then enjoyed it later with some friends after going to see the new IMAX cycling movie at Fernbank. I think we're going to try to go catch the last stage of the Tour de Georgia today. We'd really like to catch a glimpse or two of Tyler Hamilton.

I'll leave you with a couple of my favorite shots from the weekend... Jarrett during his short-lived punk phase (which lasted all of about five minutes). Cute, eh?