Everybody knows that I think Tim Barry is a superb musician and also an excellent human being, but I also want to offer thanks to Virgil at Suburban Home and Vanessa at Fat Wreck, who hooked me up with a way in the door to this show, and who were both also nothing but fantastic to me. And shep., obviously, turned me on to Tim in the first place, for which I am eternally grateful. So thanks, y’all.

I’ve written before that sometimes you wonder if a guy with a guitar can rock a room based just on the power of his songs, but nobody should ever question that about Tim Barry — solely based on the power of his songs, which are so often about the fragility of human life and how you just need to go out every day and kick ass and be as happy as you can be with the time you’ve got, Tim can hold an audience captive, but then he’s also funny and engaging on stage, and he absolutely kicks it live. And last night he opened the show by hopping off stage and bringing all that energy out onto the floor to kill it on “Idle Idylist” before getting back up there to do the rest of his set.

I didn’t keep a set list, because it turns out that I don’t actually know the names of more than, like, five of Tim’s songs (even when I know all the words), but I can tell you that it was heavy on the older stuff (god, I love “Dog Bumped” so fucking much) and less heavy on the new album, but the songs he pulled out from the new album were great. Live, “Downtown VCU”, a song I find charming but lightweight on the album, carries the full force of Tim’s humor and the vaguely heartbreaking underlying message of the songs, and “Will Travel” is the perfect show-closer for anyone anywhere, pretty much.

And Ash told me to be prepared to cry when Tim did “Prosser’s Gabriel”, and cry indeed I did. What an incredibly powerful song — Tim prefaced it by talking about how when you drive on I-95 through Richmond, you’re driving over old slave cemeteries that Richmond has paved over, and it’s such a stunning image, both narratively and in the song. 28th & Stonewall is an out of this world album in general, but that song is the jewel of it by no small margin; that’s a song of a career, right there. Beautiful and incredibly painful to listen to.

It was a great set, Tim was gracious and kind when I spoke to him afterwards, and I am never, ever disappointed when I go out to see him play.

If Ninja Gun was a band that was local to me, I would be out to see them all the time. Sadly for me, they’re not, but if you’re in Gainesville or South Georgia, they are for you, so get your butt out the door and prepare to be rocked.

After their set, I told Coody, their lead singer, that the internet had lied to me about them — I didn’t know anything about the band before, say, Monday, besides their name and their label affiliation, so I went in search of articles or interviews just to give myself a framework, and the internet lead me to believe that Ninja Gun was one of those bands picking up the cowpunk mantel and making it their own. (Cowpunk: first paragraph; see also specifically Jason & the Scorchers, fathers of.) I think the rock-meets-country descriptor gets applied to any rock band from the South these days, occasionally mistakenly, and Ninja Gun aren’t a cowpunk band: they’re a rock band who happen to be from Georgia and who happen to have Southern accents. Some of their songs twang a little bit, sure, but so do plenty of people’s, and with Ninja Gun’s two guitar-bass-drums line-up, they’re just making rock music. Southern accents do not always mean country, internets.

I’m prone to over genre-fying bands, I know I am, come poke through my iTunes some time and be horrified — but sometimes The Rock Music really is just The Rock Music.

But that comment — “the internet lied to me about how you guys sound, by the way” — spun an interesting conversation with Coody off, about how bands get typecast because of where they’re from, not what they sound like. Obviously something I’ve thought about a lot, what with American Aquarium wearing the “next Whiskeytown” mantle simply because they’re an alt-country-ish band from Raleigh, and the Truckers being pigeonholed into Southern Rock just because they once put out an album with that phrase in the title and happen to be from Alabama. (Check out this article from London’s the Independent on a related topic: Another Country: why everything you thought you knew about cowboy music is wrong.) Musicians are some of the most interesting people out there, and Coody was no exception. Our 20 minutes of conversation, about pigeonholing genres, guitar players who are tactful and guitar players who never learn, turning 30, and chasing your dreams versus having the life people expect you to have, was a highlight of my evening.

An excellent dude with an excellent band; I need to get my act together and pick up their 2008 Restless Rubes for sure.

I owe Jay Kutchma better than a single sentence, but I don’t know if I have it in me tonight, so for the record: Jay is a fantastic songwriter, even acoustic he performs like he’s got his band behind him, he was awesome last night, and if you aren’t paying attention to Red Collar, who put out the best pure rock and roll album of 2009, you’re missing out.

I came home feeling like it had been a weird evening; it was a crowd full of mostly strangers, so that the people I knew in the 506 were Glenn (behind the bar) and Guybrarian Steve (at the door), and Jay Kutchma from Red Collar (opening the show). That’s something that’s becoming more rare, a show in the CH where I don’t know any of audience at all, but whereas I would have been awkward and grouchy about it six months ago, last night I caught up with Steve (who I rarely see at the library anymore, because he works days and I … work days elsewhere), I chatted with Jay for a while, Glenn and I talked about 506 rumors (mostly false) and ACC basketball, and I spent a long time, as noted above, talking to Coody. I took 300 photos. I watched bits and pieces of Greivis Vasquez’s Senior Night victory over Duke on the TV.

It wasn’t a weird evening; it was a perfectly normal, lovely evening. It was weird because that kind of evening has become normal, an evening full of casual acquaintances and casual friends and musicians, and even though that’s all I wanted when I moved to the NC five years ago, I don’t know that I actually ever thought I’d find it.

I joke, a lot, that 90% of my friends here spend 90% of their year on the road. It’s true, though those percentages are probably more like 75% and 80% respectively, but what all those musicians friends have done for me is open doors. If I ever land myself a big fat glamorous paid gig with a big fat famous print publication, the list of people I’ll owe thanks to will be about a mile long.

I said to Glenn last night that when I was 14, Superchunk’s Foolish came out, and I fell in love, and I thought that Chapel Hill was the coolest place in the world. He laughed, but he knew I meant it, and I still do: the Triangle may not be the coolest place in the world, but damned if it isn’t cool enough for me. Damned if it hasn’t turned out to be, 15 years after teenaged me fell in love with Mac McCaughan, the place I’d been waiting to be all my life.

I have a lot on my mind lately, as it probably obvious from the above word vomit; all of it good (for me, at least), and some of it a little passive-aggressive. The day job is kicking my ass. I’m busy and happy and my 30th birthday is two weeks from today. So what’re you buying me?