My friend Chi & JNB

I went to an all-women’s college in MA. I was only on campus for my first two years, but in that time I met some awesome people… namely, Chi and Arianna. Arianna is from Atlanta, but hasn’t lived here since she went up to Mt. Holyoke. She’s currently in San Francisco, but she’s moving back here at the end of the month. So that’s super awesome and we’ll have crazy adventures together soon.

Chi is from Hawaii, and that’s where she is now. Hawaii is far, far away. And it is kinda sorta expensive to go there. Which is sad for us, because this means that I haven’t seen Chi in over 4 years. And that’s a really long time not to see one of your bestest friends. But! I have pictures and I have a phone and I haz internets, so at least we can keep in touch that way.

See? We’re all cute on Halloween in 2001. Awww. Anywho. Chi was a DJ at our college radio station, and I was her very frequent radio guest, Mr. McFeely. Cuz I’d pop in all the time like Mr. McFeely from Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. Which, by the way, is a creepy-ass name for a kid’s show character. But I digress.

I started this post cuz I was thinking about how I miss seeing Jennifer Nettles in concert. If you’re around my age and grew up in the Southeast, especially in/around/between Atlanta/Athens, GA, and if you also had great taste in music, you probably would have had the awesome experience of seeing Jennifer Nettles live. If you were REALLY cool, you saw her when she was with Soul Miner’s Daughter. And if you were a little less cool and slow to catch on, like I was, you finally jumped on the Jennifer Nettles bandwagon when she was starting Jennifer Nettles Band, after listening to Sacred and Profane 50,000 times on your friends’ borrowed CDs.

So, after spending my high school years going to concerts and falling totally in love with JNB, I was eager to share the music with my new college friends. Well… imagine my surprise when I walked out the door of my dorm room with Chi one day and heard Jennifer Nettles singing. Yeah… she was like…right there on the lawn in front of my dorm. In a tiny little town in rural western Massachusetts.

Really.

Well, Jennifer Nettles Band is, sadly, no more. Jennifer is now a country singin’ SuperStar with Sugarland and she’s made it to the Big Time, which she absolutely deserves. But, the selfish part of me definitely misses going to Variety Playhouse or Eddie’s Attic to hear her belt out her bluesy/folky amazingness that defined Musical Genius in my book. It is nice to see her new website, in which she offers a tribute to her old fans and her past. Not all artists do that. And maybe, just maybe, one day she’ll head back to Atlanta, sneak into Eddie’s Attic, and do a show. That only myself and 30 other folks will know about. That would be awesome. Almost as awesome as stumbling out of my dorm room and into her band.