A few Sundays back, Beth & I were lucky enough to get to a Mountain Stage live recording in Morgantown. For those that don’t already know, Mountain Stage is a music radio show that plays on NPR stations. Each week they feature 4 to 6 musicians on their show, often in the folk, singing songwriter or bluegrass genre. Luckily, the program is based in “the mountain state of West Virginia” and tickets to the live recordings of the show are quite reasonably priced.

This time there were 5 groups that performed: Will Hoge, Sonny Landreth, The Great Lake Swimmers, Yo La Tengo, and Regina Spektor (who was the reason we wanted to get to this show in the first place). The first two guys were quite good, but neither was my cup of tea, style-wise. The Great Lake Swimmers seemed like they had a lot of potential as a bluegrass group, but their songs were just a little too laid-back & slow going for my mood at the time. I had listened to Yo La Tengo online before coming to the show & was really quite excited to hear them live. Interestingly enough, they kinda fell flat on their face in the live performance. The vocals were barely distinguishable throughout, and two of their songs turned into marathons for me as I worked to pick pieces of melody and musicality out of the 10-minute-long floods of sound that were the songs. All that being said, I went back to their albums afterward & I think I’ll probably listen to more of their stuff. I can’t say I’ll try to see them live again, though! And then there was Regina. She simply hit the spot! Performing with a cellist, violinist & drummer, it was a ton of fun watching her songs come to life and sounds so remarkably polished & clean. The only minor complaint I had was that she didn’t connect with us (the audience) at all. At a venue like Mountain Stage there’s plenty of room to talk about your work and banter with the crowd & I missed that, but her music more than made up for that shortcoming. If you haven’t listened to her latest album, give it a shot. I find her unique, sometimes light-hearted, sometimes shockingly honest style very enjoyable.