By Barley Lewis-McCabe

Atop one of Sunny Brae’s highest slopes, on a grassy porch encircled with rocks, duo Trinket and ,Kween — accompanied by some of their musician friends — serenaded a crowd of people standing or dancing, elbow to occasionally swinging elbow, on the curve of the road. They sang authentically, they were able to encapsulate the Humboldt young adult experience in all its strange ways — good times and bad times existing all at once. A crowd of strangers became friends amidst a shared catharsis. It was folk punk.

Porchfest is an annual free music festival, taking place on Oct. 4 this year, where Sunny Brae’s residents with the nicest porches invite musicians to play on their front steps. 75 bands ranging from funk, punk, Indonesian percussion, fog rock and even acoustic niche-hypothesis world music — a term coined by the band ANH (acoustic niche-hypothesis). In the interactive musical museum that was Porchfest, folk music was particularly popular. 

“Being able to like, be there and speak and share what I’m feeling is just so powerful for myself and for the people around,” Trinket said. “That’s the appeal of folk music and why it’s branched out to like so many different genres, because it still retains that freedom of expression and freedom of emotion while also being able to like, go down these different paths of music. That’s something I really love about Porch Fest.” 

Folk is, of course, an incredibly wide-ranging genre. It’s earnest and heartfelt, it’s occasionally electric, it’s Americana. Emmett Bonds, a forestry master’s student, sees it in this very same intersecting sort of way.

“There’s something about folk music that is just very representative of the sort of American experience and the sort of melancholy homegrown aspect of it,” Bonds said. “It’s sort of romantic. It’s sort of depressing. There’s something there.”

Lilli Willows, senior psychology major, guitarist and lead singer for performing band Half Wing, described their music as “Dream Folk,” something exemplified by the band’s carefully structured soundscape. Slow and otherworldly guitar licks played alongside a soft and drawn out fiddle, underscored by a steady and low-key rhythm section — perfect theme music for a space cowboy riding a weird horse on the billowing plains of Alpha-Colorado. 

There were few desires that couldn’t be fulfilled by the neighborhood hosts. If you wanted lemonade or some baked goods there was a kid waiting to sell it to you, it wasn’t much harder to find an ice chest offering beers or a soda. At any show people would greet their neighbors like long lost family, embracing each other in their arms and sharing in the music.

 Willows believes folk music is particularly popular in Arcata since it ties into a culture of respect for our community, saying it, “tickles our values.”

“I think behind folk is this feeling of community, this togetherness that you don’t find in other music. It’s more accessible…” Willows said. “A lot of different music fits into that genre. I’m going to say, folk music is almost like storytelling music. It touches into a deeper tradition of music where music isn’t like a commodity, but [freely] shared,”

Trinket felt right at home playing on someone else’s porch, saying that the beauty of Porchfest was in its similarity to the most popular folk music stage in America, the street corner.

“I really like busking. I really like setting up on a street corner and playing. Porchfest is kind of like that, right?” Trinket said.
“There are some people who live here — who are awesome people — who’re like, ‘Hey, do you guys want to just like, play at our house?”

Barley is the good-timing Editor In Chief of The Lumberjack, as well as a jack of all trades news writer. Contact him for any reason at bl258@humboldt.edu