From two rows back someone quipped, “I guess quiet is the new loud.” The Hive Dwellers were into the third song of their set, but only the first few rows were able to hear a word of it.
Without a microphone, Calvin Johnson’s booming baritone dissipated into the chatter and bar noise. The drummer played with t-shirts draped over his stripped down kit, and though cords connected bass and guitar to what looked suspiciously like amps, they might as well not have been turned on. The low volume forced the interested to pay close attention, but for those there just to see Kimya Dawson, the Hive Dwellers were most memorable as a visual experience.
Throughout the set, Johnson shook his hips coyly and preened across the stage, pausing in ridiculous poses. Was he doing karate? Was he balancing on a surfboard? Was he surprised by the sighting of an old friend in the audience? If an explanation was offered, it wasn’t heard.
Dawson was still giggling at Johnson's moves after her first song, exposing at least one of them - the "doggie hydrant." It’s a low-impact dance step she learned in a water aerobics class, she explained, an anecdote that flowed nicely into "Bobby-O," the tale of a water aerobics instructor/obscene vaquero from her children’s album, Alphabutt.
Dawson continued to tell stories between songs, sometimes even in-between verses. The crowd was silent as she spoke or sang; they willingly gave her the attention that the Hive Dwellers coaxed out of only a few. After telling a story about her love of 80s arena rockers the Outfield, she invited Kaia Wilson of the Butchies onstage for a mostly-chorus sing-a-long of “Your Love.”
Wilson was the first of a long line of people that Dawson pried out of the crowd on Saturday night - it felt like we had been invited to her house for a party, but she was the only person there that we knew. Every time she turned her attention to someone else, we tried not to seem too awkward or conspicuous in the corner nursing our beer. Yet Dawson always came back to us, making us feel special with her warm, often hilarious songs.
