The Swell Season at Virgin Festival

This weekend was the much-anticipated (for me, anyways) Virgin Mobile Festival at the Pimlico Racetrack in Baltimore. The 31-band festival featured everyone ranging from the Foo Fighters to Lil' Wayne to Bob Dylan. I'm gonna take a cue from my comrade Matt over at Addicted to Vinyl and just try to cover one band at a time (I highly encourage you to go check out Matt's thoughts on the festival...but please do so after reading my own).

First on my docket of bands to blog about from this weekend is The Swell Season. The Swell Season is in fact the duo of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, stars of the movie Once. If you've never seen once, go out and rent it. On my list of movies with musical themes and whatnot, it's only slightly below High Fidelity. Trust me, it's brilliant. The Swell Season were definitely one of the lower maintenance acts of the festival; Glen Hansard did his own soundcheck, complete with the old, wrecked guitar he's had since God knows when (pretty sure it's also the same one from the movie), and when he introduced Marketa Irglova they had to delay the show to get one last piece of equipment. I've never seen an audience for a singer-songwriter duo quite so pumped (previous audiences for Cat Power and KT Tunstall were far more subdued).

The Swell Season stuck primarily to tracks from the movie and/or soundtrack to Once, making a point to play favorites like "When Your Mind's Made Up" and "Lies", and of course the song that Glen described as the child they're oh-so proud of, the Oscar-winning "Falling Slowly". Further proving they don't really take themselves to seriously Hansard joked with the crowd, saying that "all I knew of Baltimore before coming here came from 'The Wire', so I was pretty scared. We got lost on the way here and I think we drove onto the set.". And in a moment amusing to everyone in the audience and on stage, Glen asked the intrusive camera guy if he could "just fuck off a bit". Well, everyone except the camera guy was amused at least.

The Swell Season - Falling Slowly [iTunes]

After their official set came to a close, the audience (myself included) called for one more song, so Glen and Marketa came back out, jumped down into the pit, and played one last unplugged, singalong track to everyone's enjoyment. Across the board The Swell Season played one of the more enjoyable sets of Saturday afternoon. Pictures are below. Anyone who was there and took notes on the setlist can feel free to post it.




You can check out the rest of my pics at my flickr site. I'll be adding stuff that other people posted to that set as I get time to, but right now all you see is what I posted.

==TJ==