Vera Open Mic Night 8-3-2011

The Vera Project is holding open mic nights the first Wednesday of each month. This isn't the first time the Vera Project has had open mic nights, but it's the first time in several years.

I ended up steering the open mic night, so I wasn't able to film things. I got one of the volunteers to film the show with my Flip, so I do have some video. I didn't bring my good camera so I didn't get photos, and my Flip only had 12 minutes of space, so we got one act and a bit of the next. Hopefully next time I'll be able to catch more of the show.

Open mics are interesting since you never know what you're going to get. Spoken word performances, poetry, music of different sorts (usually solo, often a singer/songwriter/guitarist), as I said you never know who's going to show up and what you're going to see and hear. That can be one of the best aspects of open mics; at the same time it can also be a little painful, but we managed to get a consistently good set of performances so it was a pretty cool evening.

The performances at the first open mic night were mostly singer/guitarists who wrote their own songs, maybe 8 out of 10 or so.

The first act I managed to get taped was Tom, this song is from his Milwaukie band:


I can't quite make out the name of the Milwaukie band, but he says it right at the beginning of the recording so you can check it yourself. Nice acoustic guitar playing, odd lyrics about mushrooms, definitely different and amusing.

I got all of Tom's performance recorded, you can check out the whole recording (all of Tom and the first bit of Shelby) here.

Next up was Shelby, she played a nice understated acoustic guitar and sang an original song called "Never":

She has a nice breathy singing style and gets some interesting lyrics and emotion out in a fairly short excerpt. Unfortunately I didn't get the whole thing, as my recorder ran out of room.

I ended up hearing roughly 8 musical acts and a couple of spoken word performances. One comedian had the audience talking back which was fun, and Julia did a bit that was somewhat self revealing and told me things about her I hadn't known. It takes a certain amount of courage to get up there and talk about personal stuff, I admire that!

Hopefully I'll get more of next month's open mic recorded so I can blog about more of the acts, I found the experience charming and the variety was excellent.