Laura Veirs!!!

It's going to be a crazy weekend of speed-reading and essay-writing, but that didn't stop me from going to the Laura Veirs concert at the Zodiac tonight, which was AWESOME. (It also didn't phase me that I couldn't find anyone who had ever heard of Laura Veirs, so I was like, fuck this, I'm going by myself.) The lead singer from Your Heart Breaks opened the show, and even though I was like, "sure, I'll buy a CD!" before realizing they were ten pounds and instantly regretting that decision, I'm listening to it now and I'm retroactively glad that that happened. And then Veirs came out on stage, and I was surprised to find that she looks almost exactly like a slightly younger version of the professor who taught my gov seminar on grassroots democracy as a freshman and once invited us all over to play with her toddler and watch Primary Colors. The deja vu was sort of unsettling and mesmerizing all at once. I was secretly hoping that she'd play Parisian Dream (which was the first song I'd heard of hers), but she did play a bunch of songs from Saltbreakers (including Cast a Hook in Me, which is my fave, and Nightingale, which is not my fave but was awesome performed live). And just to mix things up, she followed them up with a song on the banjo, and managed to get a room of two hundred British people and myself to stomp along and clap in time. (Did you know that the banjo is a fusion of gourd and catgut instruments brought to the US during the slave trade and the fiddles that Irish immigrants brought when they arrived? I don't actually know if that's true, but Veirs said it was, and I trust her because she's taken up quilting and I instinctively trust people who quilt.)



Rock on, ma'am.