I’m back from Cornerstone Festival 2011. While at the festival, I journaled the experience on the Official Cornerstone Festival website, but I’m going to copy those posts to here and expound on them a little bit with a little more personal and critical commentary.

The heat eased off a little bit at the Cornerstone Festival grounds on Saturday, but the damage had been done. I was much slower and lethargic and I was less inclined to jump from tent to tent as much as the days before. During the day, I hung out at the Gallery Stage seeing a whole lot of artists that I didn’t know about yet.

I had heard of Timbre, but I didn’t realize just how popular she was at the festival. She brought a cavalcade of musicians on stage with her with a string section and lots of intricate music. However, the crowded tent was oppressively muggy with all of the body heat. River James played afterwards. The band is conglomeration of members of MAE and Army of Me and I really enjoyed their show. I had never heard of Lauren Mann and she was another pleasant suprise in the early part of the day. Her Sara Bareilles-inspired music included banjos, melodica, and keyboards.

A friend of mine plays guitar with Songs of Water, so I started the evening off at the Gallery Stage. This is their first appearance at Cornerstone Festival and they brought plenty of instruments and an intricate sound with violins, drums-a-plenty, and guitars. I had to run from there to catch The Rendition. Sometimes I wonder if anyone reads the blogs on the Cornerstone website, but the singer for the Rendition messaged me about my review of their show last year and invited me to come back this year. Since I had been called out, I had no choice but to see them again this year. I’m a big fan of piano-driven bands and I enjoyed the complicated process of playing guitar and the bass drum at the same time so their show was a lot of fun for me.

For the evening, Anberlin delivered a rocking set of powerful music with a setlist that evenly covered all of their albums. I don’t usually go down front much anymore to rock out with the kids, but I couldn’t resist. The band brought extra drums on stage for some of their songs for driving versions of songs from their new album, Dark Is The Way, Light Is A Place. Lead singer Stephen Christian’s solo project, Anchor and Braille, was moved to Saturday evening at midnight. I thought about going, but our group ended up sitting around and having a lengthy conversation. Sometimes we are moving around so much from show-to-show that we don’t ever really have any kind of in-depth discussion, so it was a nice break from the blitz of concerts.