All Hills Aside

Mood: good (how extraordinary!)
Music: Po' Girl - Corner Talk

Another Hillside has come and gone. And holy shit - they sold out this year. Magical things can happen when you mingle angsty youth and a bunch of hippies. By Sunday evening, about every third person under the age of 20 was sporting an Arcade Fire t-shirt. (Lack of advertising, my ass.)

So I'll get on it! Most memorable (good) musically related things this year in no particular order! :

• The girl with the voice like dark chocolate. ...Or really really great sex. But I'll stick with the chocolate on account of it's good every time. (Check out Po' Girl!!!)
• When Jessica Leger workshopped ("Bitter Sweet") at the Sun Stage with Crescent & Frost and Luke Doucet and another girl who was really good but I don't know her name, and they closed with an improvized, yet perfectly harmonized stop-you-dead-in-your-tracks round of You Are My Sunshine
• Luke Doucet. - Just - Luke Doucet.
• The Arcade Fire dedacating their last song to a really cool person.
• The girl from Crescent & Frost being so damn cute and good at singing!! And covering Neil Young as well as a sweet and amazing Stop in the Name of Love
• The Be Good Tanyas performing In My Time of Dying at the Sunday Gospel Jam
• The Clumsy Lovers being for lack of better termanology 'FRICKIN' AMAZING'!!!
• Watching Trish Klein (Be Good Tanyas, Po' Girl) play. And listening too!
• Sam Roberts asking for "a cold one" appoximately one song into his set.

Cuff the Duke rocked too, and Kelly Joe Phelps was a pleasant surprise.

Josh Ritter was a bit of a let-down. The fact that his name was Josh and he was from Ireland really got my hopes up. But to my dismay, he was like taking everything that annoys me about Mikey and shoving it under a microscope, allowing it to breed, plugging it into an amplifier and submerging in it for an hour, three times a day.

For me, there was but one other let-down at the fesival and it had nothing to do with the music! It had to do with a couple of assholes lining up their chairs literally along the front edge of our blanket five minutes before the Gospel Jam thereby obstructing the perfect spot that we had waited an hour for. And jabbing me with their umbrella which the stupid woman shoved under her seat - Because that's how damn close they were!!

So, great. That was bloody ignorant. I probably looked scandalized but they failed to take notice and proceeded to chat merrily between themselves. Maybe they're ageists, who knows. Maybe they had a bad experience with a pair of girls that resembled me and Megs who toilet-papered their home and molested their garden gnomes. Who knows. Maybe they're just deaf as well as ignorant and needed to be up close, and could not have possibly taken a seat farther back in the house like all the other people who arrived at the same time. Who knows. Anyways, we moved.

But what really pissed me off about these people is that they were back five minutes before Po' Girl's set and proceeded to park themselves directly - astutely - in front of a couple of little kids who'd been waiting nearly as long and as patiently Megs and I. What the hell is the matter with these people!? When the kid's mom brought to their attention (like they weren't keenly aware of it) that they had just robbed a couple little kids of the oppourtunity to enjoy a good show that they'd waited patiently for, the the guy indicated that the children could play on a crappy square of grass at the corner of the stage and directly beside a speaker. Um, no. The kid's mom told them off, but I was about thirty seconds away from getting Security. People like that shouldn't be allowed at a community-oriented festival... It's a shame how many other people could have been wearing those wristbands. It really is.

Something that was cool though: The "voice" of CBC radio in the morning was eating breakfast down the table from us in the Stage Left Cafe, and it was weird because you'd look around to see where the radio was and see the actual guy sitting there discussing the previous day's performances.

Anywho. I'm all tucker'd out. Here, have some Luke Doucet.

...Cheers!