It’s only the second week in my Friday new music blog post series and I feel like I’m already cheating. I always write about the concerts I got to already, but I’m co-opting my post about last night’s Mt. Joy concert and making it my new music post for today too since I figure most people reading this have no idea who Mt. Joy is. Hey at least I’m writing.

I first saw Mt. Joy at the 2017 Newport Folk Festival. At the time they may have had one song up on Spotify. Whatever it was it was enough to get me to put them on my Newport schedule. As I stood there grooving out to them they all of a sudden started singing about Baltimore in their song “Sheep” and I was like who is this band? Are they from Baltimore? Turns out they are not. They have roots in Philly but fully formed and are now based in L.A. I did find out last night about the Baltimore connection though. The lead singer said that Baltimore has a special place in their heart because it influenced one of their earliest songs and his brother went to college in Baltimore so he hung out here a lot at the time.

Anyway, they finally put out a full album back in March which I really like, so I jumped on the chance to see them again when I saw they were going to be playing the 8×10. The 8×10 is one of Baltimore’s well known little concert clubs and for some inexplicable reason until last night I had never been there. There is no logical explanation for this that I can figure out. As a through line from last week, The Stray Birds, who I wrote about last week even have a song called “Sabrina” all about a fan that used to come see them play at the 8×10.

Usually I try to get to shows early enough to support the opening act and check them out even if I don’t know them. For whatever reason I didn’t make it down there until about halfway through Illiterate Light’s opening set, which turned out to be a good thing because I did not particularly care for them. The rest of the crowd seemed into them though, so good for them.

Speaking of the crowd it was a good one. I was shocked by how everyone seemed to know the words to every song and were singing along. That made me happy. I’m a shorty so I often have problems seeing at standing room only shows unless I’m right up front or standing so far back behind the crowd that I can see over it. Neither was an option last night, so I wound up trying my luck up in the balcony. The rail was only one set of people deep when I got up there, but I still couldn’t really see. I had resigned myself to not really seeing anything, but a little ways into the Mt. Joy set the guy in front of me went and stood behind his girlfriend and waved me up to the rail. So thanks to you random stranger for allowing me to see at least half of the concert. I also felt particularly old at this show. I remember going to shows when I was in college and seeing the random one or two old people hanging out by themselves and thinking weird old people at a club. Well now I am the creepy, weird, old, music loving person hanging out by myself at the club with people at least half my age. Life comes at you fast.

Mt. Joy was good.  They pretty much played all the songs off their album plus a couple of covers. One was a Neil Young song that they played as the first song of their encore. When they went off stage before the encore people started shouting one more song and then someone got people to start saying two more song instead of just one. When they came back on stage they said we were just going to play one more song, but now we’re going to play two. I appreciate the sentiment, but I’m on to you Mt. Joy. I could see their set lists on the stage from my vantage point in the balcony and there were always two songs in the encore. Nice try.

I had a hard time rousing myself to go out on a gloomy Thursday night. The lack of sun always sends me into hibernation mode and my introverted self would often rather just stay home even when I know I’ll have a good time once I get somewhere. I did in fact enjoy myself once I got there and am glad I went.