This is What I Saw with Strangefolk

photo credit: Andrew Francke

Thursday, August 21st, 2025

One of my two twelve-year-old sons had just finished packing and was on his way down to help his hero – his nineteen-year-old brother – fold and pack his suitcase. His anti-hero twin and I were folding the next load of still warm laundry at the kitchen table while their dad gassed up the car and went grocery shopping. We were getting ready for the following day’s journey up to Jay Peak Resort in Vermont for Strangefolk’s Garden of Eden festival.

The first Eden took place (and got its name) in Eden Mills, Vermont in August of 1996. I was still three months shy of seeing my first show then. I saw every Eden from 1997 until 2004 but hadn’t been to one since. This coming weekend would be my ninth Eden, but the band’s fifteenth. The anticipation had been building for months.

As my son peppered me with questions about our weekend plans, I thought about how many of our friends would also be there. Having spent 2007-2021 on the west coast, most of them had never met our kids. Now that we’re back home in New England, I gave my son the same advice I gave to his father on the eve of the first Eden we attended together in 2000: Don’t bother trying to remember the names of everyone you’re about to meet; putting faces to names will come over time.

“What are the band members’ names again?” His brow furrowed as he tried to remember.

“The three you saw play in Maine last summer were Jon Trafton on lead guitar, Erik Glockler on bass and Luke Smith on drums. The only one you haven’t seen play yet is the lead singer and rhythm guitarist, Reid Genauer.”

He nodded, and I could see the gears in his head turning. What he said next was the last thing I expected.

“I can’t name any Strangefolk songs.”

I stared incredulously at him for a few silent seconds. His expression shifted from offhanded admission to mischievous amusement as he took in my dumbstruck reaction.

“What do you mean? We have absolutely played Strangefolk for you and your brothers!”

“Yeah, since they announced Eden!” He giggled. “Oh, wait! I do know know one – ‘Sometimes’.”  He shrugged, as if this were no big deal, oblivious to my incredulity that he had just a single song title at the ready.

How could this child, whose parents met through mutual friends at a Strangefolk show in 1999 – whose very existence was intrinsically linked to the band’s – have only a single Strangefolk song title in his memory? I suddenly felt like a failure as a parent; where did I go wrong? Perhaps it wasn’t a shortcoming of mine, but simply a product of the digital music age; he didn’t have an album, tape or CD with artwork and track lists to stare at like we did. Even so, just one song title? One was an impossibly small number. It stood in stark contrast to all the other Strangefolk-related numbers in my memory.

There was no other band that ever came close to the embarrassingly high triple digit figure that served as the most accurate estimate of how many times I had seen Strangefolk and various related side projects of theirs play between 1996 and when my oldest son was born in 2006. Thousands of miles and cumulative months’ worth of time were spent on road trip adventures all over the country. While at home, I must have invested nearly as much time dubbing their tapes – both for trades and to include as bonus tapes in trades I was setting up in AOL’s Phish Bowl chat room (that’s how I had first been introduced to Strangefolk, so I knew it was an effective way to pull in newbies). I lost count of how many show reviews and feature articles I had written for Jambands, Jambase, and other online music magazines. As time wore on, countless more hours had been dedicated to co-founding, co-managing and driving awareness and engagement for Strangers Helping Strangers (SHS), a now sadly defunct non-profit group that held non-perishable food drives for food banks and homeless shelters local to wherever the band visited on tour.

After Reid Genauer left the band in 2000, Strangefolk suffered a succession of other losses in managerial and administrative support, which included their publicity manager moving on to greener pastures. Though I lacked the experience and music industry rolodex that a seasoned professional would have brought to the table, I volunteered to do my best, an offer that the band graciously accepted.

Thinking back to those tumultuous, uncertain years, a bittersweet memory of a thank you card with a cheerful looking cartoon elephant on the front floated to the surface. The interior of that card contained expressions of gratitude and signatures from the remaining members of the administrative support staff, as well as from the band members, which were now Jon, Erik and Luke, but with the addition of rhythm/co-lead guitarist Luke “Patchen” Montgomery and keyboardist Don Scott. The card had been delivered to my home address shortly after I reluctantly stepped down as their publicist circa 2003. I cried until my eyes burned when I read it.

I hated to admit it, but my then-boyfriend (now, husband) was right when he lovingly shared his observation that working full time all day and then working on Strangefolk’s publicity all night was taking a toll on me. Something had to give, and it couldn’t be the day job that was paying the bills.

Not only was I burning the candle at both ends, my default setting of cheerful optimism was beginning to slip away. Strangefolk’s shows – which had once been my favorite place in the world; it was my home away from home – had now become a source of stress, frustration and disappointment as venues that had once been guaranteed sell outs became less of a sure thing.

Strangefolk was a different band now that Reid had left. Some fans stuck around, others walked away and didn’t look back. Though new fans who had only ever known the current line up were consistently being added to the mailing list, their numbers weren’t enough to offset (let alone overtake) those who were walking away. I don’t know if a seasoned PR professional could have turned that boat around, but I did know that I saw little correlation between how hard I was working and how that showed up at the box office. In later years, when job interviewers would ask what I considered to be my biggest professional failure, I often told the story of having managed publicity for my favorite band.

That thank you card with the cheerful elephant on the cover now lives in a photo album along with scores of disposable camera photos and a carefully preserved collection of backstage passes. I couldn’t remember the last time I had looked through that album – it was probably sometime before the twins were born.

Once the last of the folded clothes had been tucked into the laundry basket, I plugged my phone into our stereo system, queued up the first song, and then told my son to go downstairs and have his brothers come up and join us at the kitchen table. While he did that, I retrieved that photo album from its shelf in our office. I caught the other two up on our discussion so far, motioning for them to each take a seat at the table.

As “Lore” played in the background – I named each song as it began – we flipped through that photo album together. I shared some of the G-rated road trip and post-show hotel party stories, and all three were attentive and engaged listeners. I appreciated that the nineteen-year-old was humoring me, while also being keenly aware that the days of conversations like these with the twins – still free of eyerolls and earbuds – are numbered.

When we returned to the packing task at hand, I glanced at the arrangement of things my aspiring drummer – the twin whose curiosity sparked this trip down memory lane – planned to stow in his backpack for the weekend. I noticed he’d included his drumsticks and practice pad. I didn’t know if the stars would align to make it happen, but I hoped I’d get a chance to introduce him to Luke, and that he might be willing to share a few words of drumming wisdom.

Saturday, August 23rd, 2025

Last night’s show exceeded my expectations. For a band that hasn’t played together since 2019, they sounded surprisingly solid. Whatever time they had invested in rehearsals had absolutely paid off. Based on what I heard from everyone I spoke to so far, the sentiment was the same. We all had different peak moments for different reasons, but no one had any complaints.

One of the most memorable highlights for me was “Chasing Away;” there was no keeping the smile from my face as it unexpectedly wound its way into The Cars’ “Moving in Stereo” (which would make another appearance in the weekend’s final encore). The tease was cohesive enough that I thought the full band was about to fully drop into debuting it as a cover, but then Jon abandoned it, returning to the original “Chasing Away” jam. He continued to weave back and forth from it before finally landing back on the song’s structured finale.

Another stand-out from the first night for me was “Blue and Grey.” Describing a song’s sound always falls short of doing it justice, but if I had to try, I’d say imagine if The Turtles’ “Happy Together” was re-written in the wake of the relationship described in that song falling apart. Both share a similarity in understated verses that speak to a relationship’s story before giving way to an explosive chorus that releases a pent up well of emotion.

With a hauntingly melancholic melody, lyrics to match, and vocals that shift from cautiously inquisitive to combustible despair, “Blue and Grey” has been in my top five list of favorites since I heard its debut at Eden in 1997. Reid Genauer typically gets all the love for his impassioned vocals, but don’t sleep on Erik Glockler’s ability to subtly shift a lyrical dynamic through vocal resonance, metered volume, and strategic syllabic emphasis. I’ve often lamented the song’s rarity status, though its infrequency makes it that much more special if you’re lucky enough to catch one. In this case, I was unlucky in missing the song’s start with an ill-timed trip to the restroom, but that was made up for by locking eyes and exchanging smiles with another woman who was also belting out the lyrics with everything she had as we passed each other on the walkway that ran behind the soundboard.

“Do you want to try to find some more people before the show starts?”

I was pulled back to the present by the sound of my husband’s voice. I looked up at him as he extended a hand to help me out of my camp chair. We had seen almost everyone we’d hoped to, but there were still several friends I hadn’t run into yet that were likely to be congregating in the “Glock side, rock side” section in front of the stage.

I nodded and took his hand, but when we got down to the floor, we ran into more friends on Trafton’s side we hadn’t caught up with yet. As we were talking, the crowd quickly filled in around us and before I knew it, fireworks marked the imminent start of the show. Since we were here, in the second row, we decided to stick around for at least the first few songs. The kids would be fine with their uncle, who had also made the trip up for the weekend.

“Valhalla” opened the show, which was quickly followed by “Poland” with its resolving crescendo pushing the crowd’s energy dial to 11. The last time I saw Reid was at an Assembly of Dust show in December of 2014 at the Tractor Tavern in Seattle. His voice had always been a commanding presence that played a major role in defining Strangefolk’s signature sound – and that still held true at this AOD show – but that was now more than ten years ago.

With fifty looming large on my own horizon, bringing with it plainly visible age markers, I am well aware that time comes for us all eventually. That being the case, I was keeping my Eden expectations in check. I had braced myself for accepting that things change over time, and Reid’s voice could very well be one of those things, but I was relieved to find that mental preparation was completely unnecessary.

Time’s passage was undetectable in Reid’s ability to hit all the notes and maintain control no matter how much energy was put into each line. I was reminded of a video I’d seen of Lina Vasta, a 90-year old soprano whose voice continued to give nothing of her age away. They say if you don’t use it, you lose it, so it would stand to reason that as long as you do use it, you won’t lose it. I was glad to hear that’s still the case for Reid and hope it continues to be for many years to come.

Though I knew I’d pay for it the following day in creaky, protesting 49-year-old joints, I danced like I was 25 again for those two opening songs. My husband later commented that that was his favorite moment from the weekend. In the silence that followed his saying so, I remembered that one of my vows to him on our wedding day was that I would always dance, either with him or beside him. I hadn’t done enough of that lately, and if I wanted to maintain the ability to, I needed to start prioritizing it more. This weekend was a good start, but I was grateful when the slower, meandering pace of “I Tell Myself” followed “Poland.”

During set break, I noticed someone carrying a smoking bundle of sage as he climbed the incline near where we sat along the edge of where the grass met the walkway. I was so transfixed by the glowing embers on the sage that I didn’t even look at who was holding it as he passed.

“Whoa, was that a huge joint?” My non-drummer twin giggled as the sage holder passed. I pulled my gaze from the bundle without looking at its owner to answer him. I explained a bit about the folklore surrounding sage, its association with health, warding off evil, and its use in Native American rituals for spiritual cleansing and purification. I added that its history was part of the reason why we chose it as their older brother’s middle name.

A few minutes later, I caught sight of someone that looked like Luke Smith walking down the hill, though I couldn’t see his face from where we sat…but that baseball cap looked a lot like the one Luke had just been wearing on stage. I watched him reach the crowd and noticed the smoke that was accompanying him; it was the guy with the sage, so no, not Luke. Or was it, but I just hadn’t noticed? I never did look up at the sage holder’s face. I continued to watch him move through the crowd, stopping every so often to chat or hug someone and I caught a quick glimpse of his profile. It was Luke.

Did I have enough time to get to where he was before he’d reach the backstage area? I didn’t know, but if there was a chance, I had to try. I turned to my drummer-in-training.

“Do you want to meet Luke, the drummer?”

My son’s face lit up and he was nodding emphatically before I finished speaking. I took his hand and he grabbed his twin brother’s as I pulled them both along behind me as we raced over to the set of stairs that ran along the Glock side half of the stage. We got to the floor just as Luke was posing for a group picture with friends I had already seen once that weekend, and a few others I hadn’t yet, but that had to wait.

As Luke stood up, he gave a few more hugs and then turned to leave the audience area. I gently put my hand on his arm to get his attention, and not wanting to delay him if he was due backstage soon, I dispensed with what would have been my usual greeting and got straight to the point.

“Hey Luke! Do you have a few seconds to share some words of wisdom for an aspiring drummer?”

My youngest son (by 2 minutes) was hanging slightly back, as if unsure of how this was going to go. I rested my hand on his back to urge him to step forward, so he’d be standing next to me. He did and looked up at Luke with a shy, but hopeful smile. I looked back at Luke and a huge grin broke across his face.

“Yes,” he said, “absolutely! DANCE!”

Luke then gave my son a demonstration of what he meant with loose, fluid movements that illustrated his point perfectly.

“That’s all you need to do,” he continued as tendrils of sage smoke encircled him, “stay on the beat…hit the cymbal…” he tapped an imaginary cymbal as he spoke, “…and just DANCE.”

We thanked him, waved our goodbyes and returned to our spot at the top of the hill. As soon as we were within earshot of their dad and uncle, both twins began trying to beat each other to the punch in telling their new show story.

Personal highlights from the second set included a solid “Alaska,” and an incendiary “All the Same.” As “Speculator” began and the crowd singing along was nearly as loud as Reid’s amplified voice, I couldn’t help but smile to myself. I actually love 99.9% of this song, but once upon a time, I was pretty vocal about that .1% that I didn’t love. I’m not going into that here; it’s my own weird peccadillo and I have no intention of tainting anyone’s potential first impression of it with an explanation. That said, because most of my friends had heard about that one tiny thing I didn’t like, they now think of me as a “Speculator” hater…and that’s fine.

As the inimitable Philip Seymour Hoffman said in Almost Famous while portraying Lester Bangs: “You have to make your reputation on being honest and unmerciful.” Even before that movie was made, I knew that to be true and have always strived to be so while my reputation as a writer was being built. Now that I’m older – and hopefully wiser – I’m less concerned with what people think about me and my opinions. There are always going to be those who take a .1% piece of information and spin it into a narrative that doesn’t reflect the truth and again…that’s fine. As Eleanor Roosevelt once famously said, “What other people think of me is none of my business.”

To pull a line from the song in question, I’ll still tell you “what I saw” whenever I’m writing up recaps like this, but that recount will be more about moments of clarity, joyful experiences, and unbridled gratitude than criticisms. Life is too short to dwell on perceived imperfections, and I don’t intend to waste any more time on that.

Following “Speculator,” the malevolent, slinky groove of “Take it Easy on Me” immediately got me out of my camp chair to dance again. As it evolved, twisting, contorting, and dropping into a tease of Phish’s “Tweezer” along the way, I made a mental note to add this one to my list of top priorities when the tapes go up on Relisten and Archive. As I listened to Jon Trafton carefully build the tension, I was reminded of a memory from the HooDoo Bash tour in June of 1998 when Strangefolk toured with moe. and The String Cheese Incident.

Each night featured guest sit-ins across each band’s set. During one of the nights at The Muse on Nantucket, Jon Trafton was on stage with SCI and was absolutely ripping the shit out of a jam when I looked to my left and there stood Erik Glockler with his jaw practically on the floor. He spotted me looking at him and leaned in to exclaim “Holy shit! Jon is fucking amazing!” to which I quickly replied, “Yeah, I know!” It wasn’t until that moment that it occurred to me that Jon’s band mates don’t hear his playing like we do; they’re partially distracted by paying attention to playing alongside him. I didn’t know if Erik, Reid and Luke planned to go back and listen to this weekend’s shows too, but I hoped they would.

Monday, August 25th, 2025

Having now identified “Reuben’s Place” as the song with the drum intro, my aspiring drummer wanted to relisten to the one we heard on Saturday, and then he asked for me to play some of my favorite versions from the shows I saw. Having already played him the first one I ever heard from the bonus tape I got in a Phish trade in 1995 (which remains in my top three to this day), we’re now listening to the “Reuben’s Place” from Eden 1997 when the band invited the Jeh Kulu drummers to join them on stage.

My son is tapping his feet to one cadence while his head bobs to another as his drumsticks tap away on the practice pad in front of him. Having also been enamored with the idea of becoming a drummer after hearing Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” around age seven, I am envious of his having parents who are not only emphatically supportive of his musical aspirations but are capable of enabling him to chase that dream. Being raised by a single mother in a low-income housing project, there simply was no possibility of my owning a drum set as a kid, let alone having a place to practice if I could have. But that’s what being a parent is all about: doing your best to give your kids what your parents couldn’t give you.

I love that he’s diving down the Strangefolk rabbit hole in pursuit of various versions of his new favorite song, though even with the energy of that epic “Reuben’s Place” playing on the stereo, I’m struggling to keep my eyes open. Eight hours of work on three hours of sleep is not as easily pulled off as it used to be. Despite having Sunday as a buffer to wind down, my body still has not caught up to this weekend. I scowled at the thought of how pathetic that is since I didn’t even drink, smoke, or ingest anything. It sucks getting old, kids.

Though I did my best to get a good night’s sleep before work on Monday, I woke up at 4am and there was no going back to sleep. My mind was still racing as it struggled to process how all these sights, sounds, and faces that had once been so familiar (don’t you know) now felt so…strange.

Once upon a time, Strangefolk shows were home to me, and I wanted that same feeling to be there again…and it was, but it was different. It’s like when you fully step into independent adulthood away from your childhood home, and then after a long time away, you return to find your old bedroom has been turned into a craft room with a pull-out couch for you to sleep on when you visit.

You know that change isn’t a reflection on how your family feels about you – they still love you, miss you, and can’t wait to hug you and catch up – but there’s no mistaking that their lives have moved on without you. You might try to spend more time at home to make that feeling dissipate through repeated exposure to it, or you might spend more time away to avoid that dull ache of longing for what you know is gone forever. If your adventures landed you in a faraway place – for example, due to a job relocation to the opposite coast – you might not have much of a choice in how you handle it.

Looking back now, I see that when I leaned into my new life as a wife, mother, and corporate worker bee, I mostly tucked those memories of Strangefolk (and nearly all associated friendships associated with them) into that photo album and stored them on a shelf.

I didn’t wear the band’s T-shirts anymore or have their show posters on my wall. I never added their albums to my streaming music collection, so their songs didn’t come up in my shuffle. That’s why my youngest only knew a single song title – it was one hundred percent my doing – and that’s why that feeling of homecoming I was expecting felt more like the awkward, newly independent adult version of it.

Feeling out of place in what used to be your place is disconcerting, but there’s no denying that it’s also exactly as it should be. Turning this over in my mind, I was reminded of a movie quote from Garden State:

“It’s like you feel homesick for a place that doesn’t even exist. Maybe it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I don’t know, but I miss the idea of it, you know. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people that miss the same imaginary place.”

Having spent the past 20 years creating that new idea of home for myself, I don’t regret that doing so forced me away from my Strangefolk family, though I absolutely did miss them. I wish I had been more consistent in maintaining those friendships, but in balancing a career and parenting three boys, friends living 3,000+ miles away had to take a step down on the priority list. Reconnecting with everyone this weekend was exactly what I needed. Now that I’m adjusting to our new normal back home in New England, I’ve made a promise to myself to be more vigilant in keeping in touch with people between shows.

That said, I’m deeply grateful to Strangefolk for working through whatever obstacles stood in the way of making Eden happen this year. I hope we’ll all continue to have a home to return to up on that hill, even if it does feel a bit like sleeping on a pull-out couch in the craft room to me…for now, anyway. If the Fates allow, we’ll have plenty of opportunities to test that theory in the years to come.

***

Forget me not, forgive me now

Twenty years gone by

I may grow old, that’s what I’m told

But I ain’t never gonna die.

Said I may grow old that’s what I’m told

But I ain’t never gonna die

And we live in and of each other

We will remain

***

Chris Campbell has been contributing to Jambands.com since 1998. Her debut novel, The Strangest of Places, is available now. She lives in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire with her husband and three sons.