After a week home, I’m going to document my week at Cornerstone Festival, mostly for my own archival purposes. This is built on posts on the cornerstonefestival.com blog with a little more details and commentary here.

Every year on the last day of Cornerstone I feel about the same way. “I’m so tired and ready to go home” and yet also, “this is the last day so I better soak it all in.” So, with those two thoughts in mind, I ventured forth for my last day of Cornerstone.

I arrived at the Press Tent for an interesting discussion about “Re-Imaging CCM.” The music industry is undergoing big changes and Christian music is just a small niche in that industry, but nevertheless, it will also feel the changes as the industry as a whole changes. Downloadable music has struck a big blow at the traditional structure of how product is marketed and now affordable audio editing tools and advertising avenues like MySpace, PureVolume, and Virb are leaving bands asking questions like, “Just what does the label do for us anyways?” and that’s just as true in the Christian music market as it is in the music market as a whole. We sat through a couple more press conferences, one by Decyfer Down and one by Sean Michel, a contestant on American Idol this year who was here with his band at the festival. The most interesting press conference of the afternoon, however, was Family Force 5, as they entertained the crowd with beatboxing into the mikes and answering questions from young kids. They’re just a fun band all around and they are still really accessible despite their recent success.

Jeff Elbel enlisted us to help him record and film his show at the Gallery stage so we showed up early and caught a little bit of Spoken Word. Then we watched Exit The Ordinary, a three piece straight-up rock band that seemed a little out of place on the quieter Gallery stage, but still delivered a solid show good enough to make me pick up their EP.

Elbel and his band Ping performed next. Elbel is the guitar tech to everyone during the week of Cornerstone and works hard keeping everything running smoothly at the Gallery Stage, so this is his well-deserved chance to get a little visibility on the front of the stage. Armed with a cavalcade of video cameras, there was plenty of recordings which will hopefully someday make it into a DVD of some sort. The highlight of the show for me was his cover of U2’s “North and South of the River” which he also performed last year.

I took off and kicked it up to warp speed to get down to the Main Stage to see Family Force 5. I don’t know what to say about these guys. I’m way too old to like this kind of music, but it’s infectious, catchy, and a whole lot of fun. The crowd was one of the biggest crowds I’ve seen at the Main Stage for an opening band early in the evening and they did not disappoint entertaining everyone. I love seeing bands from home in Atlanta make it big and I have a feeling they are well on their way towards that.

Afterwards, I joined friends for dinner secluded away from all the noise in the back corners of the campground. As we sat around and talked about music, television and each others’ lives and just in general, enjoyed each others company, I thought about how many other groups of people were doing this same exact thing during this week at Cornerstone. This is a reunion time and meeting place for groups of friends year after year all across different age groups and fans of music of all sorts of styles. That’s one of the traditions about Cornerstone that I really love.

I went back to the Gallery Stage to see Leeland which was packed out. I was surprised by the big crowd as this had been the first time I had heard of them, but they brought the crowd into a mood for praise and there was definitely a very reverent and worshipful tone set over the show. The final show of the night was Sleeping At Last, which fit quite well into the late night with some dreamy songs and airy rock. Near the end of the show they played one of my all-time favorite songs by them called “Umbrellas” and the lyrics really hit me hard. Maybe it was just the Cornerstone dust or maybe I was just missing home and was reaching the emotional peak of the week knowing I was leaving so much, but returning to so much also, but let’s just say things got a little blurry for me to see.

One of the great quotes that I heard today was, “There is so much love at this festival, now take this love out to the world.” I’m tired and ready to go home, but I’m ready to take a little bit of Cornerstone with me, too.