Award-winning singer-songwriter Edie Carey has been performing internationally since 1999, singing alongside Sara Bareilles and Brandi Carlile and appearing on PRI’s syndicated Mountain Stage as well as Cayamo, Telluride Bluegrass, and Newport Folk Festivals. Her lullabies project with Sarah Sample won Best Children’s Album in the 2015 Independent Music Awards, and she was a featured vocalist along with Lisa Loeb on the 2020 Grammy-Winning ensemble “All the Ladies.” She released her acclaimed 11th album The Veil in June of 2022.
I fully intended to come to this concert and just enjoy the music. I’m a little bit mad at Sarah and Edie, though, because they made me laugh and cry way more than I planned on. I could have handled the laughing, I suppose, but I resent crying with glasses on. Trying to wipe away the tears and still see what’s going on. Really didn’t want to give away my vulnerability to everyone around me. Too much.
So, as soon as I get dried off, they tell some hilarious ‘situation’ they’re dealing with right there on the stage. Like, when Sarah kept playing the introduction to the next song, and Edie didn’t come in. Or, when Edie points out the stark transition from one song about the tender love of a child growing up to the next song with a young woman in the bar trying to figure out life. It wasn’t intended, but it did strike a funny bone. Then we sing along, totally engaged in every song, loving the variety of rhythms, melodies, harmonies – and then without warning, total disaster hits. Sarah and Edie have already confided the sweet things in their friendship and their personal lives. We’re drawn in. And Edie tells us about her own struggles with infertility and her joy about the baby that finally arrived in her life. “These things” – the song about the precious details in her baby’s life – were the things she thought she’d never have. I start weeping like her baby. But Sarah saved us, asking how many of us were crying, when it was over. Just about everybody.
Instead of going to contribute a few bucks in exchange for some nice music, I gave my soul and came home with an indelible memory of laughing and crying.