So…the Roanoke HP festival.

It was interesting. There were some weird organizational issues that could be chalked up to this being the first year of an event that got way bigger than anybody expected (and a couple of rumors I won’t go into that probably can’t). The folks in attendance seemed to have fun (even if it wasn’t always the kind of fun they were expecting) and enjoyed themselves.

Our part of the festival kind of got the short shrift; although the weather for Saturday ended up being gorgeous, the organizers made the call early to put the wizard rock in a venue several blocks away from the main festival area and didn’t do much to let anyone know where we were. The venue itself, The Spot on Kirk, was a pretty nice room to play in, but it’s kind of frustrating when for much of the day, the very talented musicians (Grace Kendall!, Tonks and the Aurors!, Hawthorn and Holly!, us!) were playing for nobody but the sound guys.

We had a few folks roll into our shows, partially because we had a couple friends in town, but mostly, I think, because we picked up our gear and set up a rogue busking show on the festival grounds (next our our friends from Mysticon) which got us a fair bit of attention for our afternoon show.

What was really frustrating was watching a metric assload of people wander into the space when a couple of YouTubers we’d never heard of were scheduled to do their thing. I guess promotion made it out for some stuff.

Oh well – our shows went well enough from a performance perspective – those that heard us dug us, and word from the crowd is that we looked and sounded good. We also took some band promo photos in front of an interesting wall that I think will probably come out looking pretty great (maybe it’s just because I’m feeling good about myself after dropping some weight, I don’t know – the other two are really pretty, pretty much all the time).

Whatever the non-optimal circumstances, we had fun playing for the folks who came out, like we always do.