About six years ago, I wanted to go to Nowhere Else Fest, a musical gathering created and hosted by the Ohio-based band Over the Rhine in and around a barn on their farm. One of my dreams involves living on a ranch on the coast with enough room for a music studio and a small venue and here were musicians I admired doing a version of that! But getting to Martinsville, OH, on a whim was more expensive and inconvenient than I had time to plan for .…
Still, I was restless… I wanted to do something. What could we do ourselves? I wondered.
Kwame has always kept a ‘boat guitar’ on his sailboat, and on calm days, we often sat on the foredeck and played songs. We also enjoyed over-nighting on the boat after sailing to different local marinas or to an anchorage on the Bay.
That weekend, instead of making our way to Ohio, we hatched a plan to reserve a series of guest slips for several nights at yacht harbors in San Francisco, Richmond and Sausalito and then invited musician friends to play on the boat once we docked. We live-streamed those first on-board song circles, and had so much fun with it, we developed the project into a monthly video series called Love the Bay. In 2019, we produced a dozen of these long-form episodes featuring different guests. We began to think about booking artists from outside the Bay Area, or producing Love the Bay shows on different bodies of water, and what it would be like if we were able to attract financial backing. We were feeling so enthusiastic about the project, we traveled to New Orleans for the International Folk Alliance and hosted a Love the Bay-themed showcase room (complete with a green screen).
Folk Alliance was a big learning experience in and of itself; moreover, our flight home at the end of January was the last time we’d fly for a couple of years. I first saw someone wearing a mask waiting at the gate in the New Orleans airport. By that time, Covid had spread to Italy and within weeks everyone’s lives would change drastically. Instead of a hosting any artists on the boat in 2020, we started playing porch concerts for the neighbords and organized a ‘SIP the Bay Virtual Festival’ and fundraiser. We managed to finish a handful of long-form Love the Bay episodes in 2021-2022, and a more safe-socially-distanced version of the LTB Tour, but given how the pandemic affected our lives and work schedules we drifted away from the project…at times we wondered if it was a thing of the past.
But as life has begun to open up again we decided to give it another go. This past weekend, we got Love the Bay back on the water, inviting more than a dozen songwriters, musicians, writers and dancers aboard to play on Espresso’s aft- deck (aka, the stage) and talk about what was inspiring them now. Big thanks to Teja Gerken, Maurice Tani, Jeanine Richardson, Aireene Espiritu, Peter Whitehead, Elizabeth Stuart, Jeff Wessman, Susan Ives, Erica Sorenson, Mokai, Matt Langlois and Christine Cali for coming aboard and sharing their art and ideas. Music and community, wind, water and a big full moon made for a heart-warming weekend. We’re not sure when and where next iteration of Love the Bay will occur but we’re pretty sure the ‘if’ is out of the equation.
Watch the latest performances and interviews at the full Love the Bay 2023 Playlist.