How I Became a House Show Junkie

Our first introduction to the House Show Concept was made by a lovely lady named Emma Hill. Here’s how this all came to be:

About three years ago, my husband was preparing to go for a run. Before he goes, he generally downloads the most recent TBTL podcast to listen to while he’s out. Typically during the run as he’s listening, they’ll play an indie artist or sometimes, not-so-indie and he’ll think to himself, “When I get home, I’m going to download that song…that was AWESOME!” and most of the time, he forgets because of that runners high or forgetfulness…you know how it goes.

But…three years ago…he actually remembered. From that moment on, Emma’s song Meet Me At The Moon was a part of our regular playlist rotation and we all really loved her sound – all of us being; my older daughter Katie, my younger daughter Alissa and my husband and myself. It wasn’t long before we knew every word and were singing our faces off to this song on road trips in the car and trips to the grocery store.

Right about the time my oldest daughter Katie was about to turn 16, she decided she wanted to take up the Ukelele. She has a lovely signing voice already and she just decided one day that she wanted to be able to pluck along with her singing on a Uke, so we bought her one. She taught herself a few songs and one of the first songs she learned was Emma’s Meet Me At The Moon. The first day she sang it for me, I was pleasantly surprised enough that I grabbed my cell phone and took a shaky video of her playing and singing the song.

Something was gnawing at me in the back of my mind and I decided to just see where it led me. I wanted to somehow get this video to Emma. So, I went online, Google searched “Emma Hill” and found a few things – one of which was a publicist. And BAM – there was an email for this dude. So, I went ahead and sent him an email, introduced ourselves and how we came to find Emma’s music and asked him to view the YouTube video and if he could somehow get it to Emma, we’d be grateful.

Well, he did. And here’s the video. And she commented on it. And we all freaked out a little bit.

It wasn’t long after the YouTube video was posted that I found her on Facebook. I liked her band page and I started scrolling. She shared the video of my Katie singing her song and was truly touched by it enough so that she found us on Facebook and we started talking about how she comes out to the West Coast during the Fall and Spring for house shows and told us she hoped she’d see us at one sometime. One thing led to another and we started talking about hosting our OWN house show with her and found out what her minimum was – and she shared with us that if we invite enough people to just charge $10 at the door and that should cover it when she adds in the sales of her CD’s and T-Shirts, etc that she sells.

We’ve hosted Emma Hill and Bryan Daste several times over the last couple years. We’ve driven down to Portland to surprise them when they launched their new album and have grown to be very good friends. We try to support them whenever we can by helping promote and create a sense of urgency for people to go see them whenever and wherever they are playing.

Here’s the title track to one of Emma’s Albums called, “The Black and Wretched Blue”