By Georgia Chapman
The DIY house show scene lives underneath the rocks of society—turn one over and look close enough and you'll find a thriving knot of life. Each show is different, but the kinds of people and music found within these basements are, for the most part, erratic dancers, loud singers, and fans of all things grunge. But when indie/folk artist Callie Edmonds enters the scene, she realizes the joy in performing. They turn up the amps and let Callie “slow it down” as she weaves her way through different stages of her career, sharing her music and gaining experience as she goes.
The smells of cigarette smoke and melted plastic baby doll heads permeate the unfinished basement room. There is a couch—once tan, now brown—that sags in the middle pushed up against the back wall. A baby doll hangs from the beam in the middle of the room that doubles as the support for the whole building and a stripper pole. In the front, a girl stands with her guitar and sings a slow melody. A resident of the house pours oil and food coloring onto a light box as music plays, spinning a plate over it to create incredible patterns that are somehow projected right onto her face, distorting her. The tattooed faces in the crowd light up and dance as best they can. The music is slow, but that just slows down the dancing. Instead of the usual thrashing, erratic movements, the room is more like a dull sea. Seeing it, I think of one of her lyrics, “I’ll slow it down, I’ll walk it off.”
After her set, she steps away from the front of the room. No one in this house ever steps down from a stage, simply because there isn’t one. She says her hellos to those crammed in the room and weaves her way to the very back where she crashes onto that brown couch, smiling to herself as the next band starts and the lighting switches. The drums are the first sound followed by discordant guitars. The first note is a guttural scream from the lead singer who lets her dyed black hair fall around her tattooed shoulders. Immediately, the dancing quickens. I sit beside the musician on the couch and ask her how she’s feeling.
“Great,” she says. “I just know they had to turn up the amps for me.”
As it turns out, they did. The party continues into the night and we catch a ride with a stranger we met while sitting on the couch. Although I can’t remember her name, I remember the star tattoo on her shoulder and the choppy pigtails of her hair. She blasts some obscure garage band through her speakers and when we pull into our destination, she turns down the volume.
“You know,” she says. “These guys remind me of you.” She is referring to the band she had just been playing, all clashing cymbals and violent vocals. When we laugh a bit, she does too. But then she clarifies, “It's the same energy. The only difference is the volume.”
I add, “And the number of instruments.”
She nods, a bit absentmindedly. “Yeah, I guess.” Turning to the musician, “But you don’t need the instruments. Or the volume. You rock, chica! What is your name?”
My friend answers, “Callie. Thanks for the ride.”
We get out of the car. It is 3 a.m. and we fall into bed. We would never see the girl with pigtails again.
♪
Because her songs are so quiet, sad, and slow, Callie Edmonds is not the typical performer in the scene. But she has still gotten her fair share of seasoning from house shows across the pond. Since attending the University of North Carolina Greensboro, she has played for houses there as well as in Boone and its surrounding areas. Her longest stint as a performing artist was in Hull, UK, preparing her for any sort of scene she could possibly come across here in the States. If house concerts in the U.S. are grungy, their British counterparts are entirely filthy, grimy, and dangerous.
“If I survived some of those shows,” Callie says, reminiscing on the venues that she played, “I’m not too scared of the houses here.” When she first went to the UK, she left with a side part and highlights. She came back with bangs and a new, tougher attitude. And an album’s worth of songs.
Soon after finding herself within it, she realized that the DIY house concert scene is highly ephemeral and varied. It differs from city to city — country to country. Like most concert venues, the shows Callie plays are usually in a basement of some sort in a standalone house. It’s preferable for the house to be located away from others. Barns make great locations. The bands and people that frequent this scene are what some might call rough around the edges. Grungy might be the word. Eyebrows are pierced, sternums are tattooed. Boots and leather and flannel galore. But more often than not, they are the best people that you could hope to be in a crowded, unairconditioned room with. If you need to smoke, you can step outside—you’ll still be able to hear. If you forgot your cigarettes, just ask. An offer of the last half of a lipstick-covered cigarette is never far off. There is a radical kindness surrounding these sorts of shows, but they do tend to go late. And they tend to be loud.
At her first show at the Womb of Boone, a popular venue located up the mountain about ten minutes away from Appalachian State University, they turned Callie’s amps way up. She told me later that she never thought she would hear her voice so loud. Apparently, neither did the neighbors. Before we were able to bum a ride home, we sat out in the cold on the soggy logs by the fire. I was on a stump, admittedly more comfortable than the log the rest of my friends sat on with a few strangers. My friends and I were talking to one of the girls who had just pulled a snail out of her pocket. We were trying to decide when it could have gotten in and eventually settled on the fact of it having crawled in off the log. She had been sitting there all night and didn’t think that was too far off. I noticed that Callie hadn’t been all too engaged with the conversation and looked more than a little nervous.
I asked her what was up and she gestured over into the gravel lot outside of the house. There was a girl hula-hooping. But the hoops were on fire. That was when I became aware of just how loud it was. There was deafening noise coming from the basement room, none of it sinister. The girl with the hula hoops put something of a spell on us. We must have sat there for minutes in the sort of trance only made possible by fire. Then we heard the sirens. Snail Girl had become a fast friend, so we shook her off the log. We booked it down the mountain which, luckily, took us in the opposite direction of the lights and shouts. Our group ran along the curvy road as the cold air burned our throats and numbed our fingertips and toes. Callie ran the whole way with a guitar on her back. Once down the mountain, we walked the Snail Girl safely to her dorm and found our way back home. The Womb of Boone didn’t have another show for a while after that.
I met Callie somewhere as dissimilar to those basements as possible: The Andy Griffith Playhouse. Before joining the house show scene, Callie frequented the playhouse, participating in every show and rarely going for lead roles. While she and my other friends participated in the productions, I worked backstage—always in black, always observing. In between scenes, I’d see her writing in her notebook or on scraps of paper.
I later asked her about it and she told me, “I’ve written shit down randomly my whole life.” She laughed and pulled out her phone, facing her notes app to me. She scrolled and scrolled. Lyrics filled every pixelated page.
She was also heavily entrenched in the church scene, if you could call it that. Callie’s first ever performance was an expert rendition of “O Holy Night” in a bright red Christmas dress. Callie Edmonds, aged eight, twirling her hair around her finger in front of the whole congregation. From there, it escalated, evolving in a way that no one who knew Callie imagined.
It wasn’t until much later that she started putting the pieces together. Again, I asked her in a strangely formal way when she had started to write her songs. Despite our being friends since 2017, the transition from the Callie that sang hymns in church and show tunes on stage to the one who poured out her feelings in some of the most emotional and evocative songs that I’ve heard was a gradual one. So gradual, in fact, that none of our friends, myself included, really noticed. One day, she just became a songwriter. And a good one. I realized all this when I sat her down for an interview, although “interview” might be the wrong term. It was a Friday night and she had just practiced with a band for the first time in her life. “Okay,” I said. “One more question. I’m sorry, this is so humiliating.” We were laughing at the formality of it. Everyone in the room was.
“I can’t believe you have to do research on me right now.” She took a sip of her drink and almost spit it out because someone in the room made a comment that we found hilarious.
“When did you start writing music?” I asked.
“Erm,” she said at first. She had the habit of audibly saying “erm”, perhaps as some residual memory of her time in the UK. I noted this internally, wanting to remind myself later to give her a hard time about it. “Like I said, I’ve written stuff randomly for a while now and would squeeze out a bad song here and there. But I’d say I started writing on purpose and regularly maybe November of 2020.”
By early 2021, she had plans for an EP, aptly titled Slow it Down. Soon, that EP morphed into an album. Callie had been going to school and getting an education, just like all of us. But at the same time, she was going into a Mount Airy recording studio and recording that first album. Through performing around town, Callie met a local producer who, although just starting out, had a top-of-the-line studio. The progress after their first meeting was slow but intricate. Callie openly admits to being a perfectionist when it comes to her songs. She often texts in our shared group chat about the newest version of the song she has been working on in the studio. She struggles with perfecting her work in the studio in a way that isn’t necessary in front of a live audience. When she performs, it's just her, her guitar, and her song. Once other elements are added, she notes a change in the process. She once said to us, “Every time I have to ask for changes, I feel mean.”
The first demo of my favorite of her songs had this issue. She sent the demo and immediately followed up with uncertainty about the sound. The guitar was accented by light percussion, harmonica, piano, and more guitar. I thought it was beautiful, but there is an inherent reluctance that an artist has when leaving their creation in another’s hands. In the end, it just wasn’t right.
We all went into the studio to fix it. I was there, once more, as an observer. Our friend on the piano who knew about Callie’s concerns recorded his part over and over again, making sure that not a single note was off. The producer layered the piano over the main guitar. He took away and put back the acoustic guitar using the recording software. The piano, too, went through several iterations of volume and tempo. Finally, Callie spoke up.
“What if we took out the guitar completely?”
I could tell that she was nervous saying it and I could tell that the producer disagreed. But he took it off and played the song. Everyone in the room knew that they had finally cracked the code. The final song on the album was done. And it was incredible. We listened to it over and over again, tweaking it here and there and chittering about how impressed and excited we were. While the producer finished up the song, Callie and I talked about album art. What we liked and didn’t. And what she wanted for the album. Before too long, though, Callie started packing up to go. I had never seen her so content with her own work before. She told me that the album might take a while but that she finally had an EP ready. She stepped away from the production and decided to upload a few demos on Bandcamp to combat her perfectionism and to have something to show for her years of practice.
“Are you in a rush?” I asked. “What is it called?”
“No, I’ve just got a gig tonight. Of course there’s no rush,” she said, giggling a bit. “It’s called Slow it Down.”