No Depression Gets Back to the Roots of Music Festivals

The No Depression Festival is kind of a big deal. "A musical education in Americana," says Jonathan Zwickel. It's this Saturday at Marymoor Park (though 520 will be closed, so set your GPS to work on that). Acts range from The Swell Season and Lucinda Williams to the Maldives and Cave Singers.

Tonight there's a pre-festival hootenanny at Ballard's Sunset Tavern ("with guests Mark Pickerel, Jason Dodson of The Maldives, Zoe Muth, Betsy Olson, Kevin Large of Widower, Jack Wilson, Lindsay Fuller and The Cheap Dates, Jeff Fielder, Gregory Paul and more!").

UPDATE: At the hootenanny in question, I was handed a postcard advertising Ear to the Ground, a No Depression compilation you can download for free at Limewire--songs from The Swell Season, The Maldives, Sera Cahoone, Chuck Prophet, and Justin Townes Earle, to name just a few.

Aficionados of roots music are far-flung; last night I met an Englishman at Watertown (No Depression's Kim Ruehl was providing a festival warm-up) who'd flown in specifically for the event. He sounded a little like Ricky Gervais, which I didn't point out to him, since Gervais is now one of the three famous Englishman that Americans think Brits sound like. That is, it's not necessarily uncanny.

But he did offer to stand me a drink, and when I begged off, explaining that I had to drive (here I mimed the steering wheel) home, his eyes widened a little.

"Oh, very good," he said. "You really drove that home there, with your mime. I wouldn't have got it, probably, with just the English, but I could see you meant driving, too. The point really sailed home." He broke off to mime driving as well. "That's quite good, that. It becomes unmissable."