NEHMA launches Dock Sessions Concert Series
Folk music drifted through the air and students gathered, armed with chips, salsa and cookies, on a warm evening at the loading dock in between the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art and the new Wanlass Center for Arts Education & Research. This was the setting of the first ever NEHMA Dock Sessions Concert series.
The band Hatchback, composed of two current students and one USU alum, took the stage on Sept. 3.
Chiara Sorensen, coordinator of visitor and events services at NEHMA, organized the new outdoor concerts with the aim to get students feeling more comfortable and excited about the museum.
“Just really wanting the museum to be a place where college students feel comfortable — feel like there’s something for them, something exciting, like live music,” Sorensen said.
Sorensen and her team could also be seen throughout the night of the first concert refilling the complimentary chips and salsa and restocking the variety of beverages provided for concertgoers.
The Dock Sessions are set to highlight local bands with ties to the campus community that feel like peers to students, Sorensen explained.
Sorensen said as she was looking for a band to perform at the first ever session, the student interns at NEHMA recommended Hatchback.
Hatchback is a Logan-based folk band that makes music band member Alex McCain described as “mountain music for the city boy.” Named by a previous bandmate because each member drove a hatchback car, the band encourages people to come away from their shows with their own feelings about what they hear.
“It’s really, really neat to see just how people’s brain chemistry can interpret music differently, and so that’s why I think it is hard to describe our music, because I feel like we write music for the majority, and because of that, it’s up to interpretation,” Jack Brady, recent USU alum and band member, said in an interview with The Utah Statesman.
McCain, the band’s banjo player and a USU senior studying information systems, remarked on how he feels about playing a community-based show like the Dock Sessions.
“The fun part about the community shows is how the community is there, you know? It’s one thing to go play at a venue when its dark and the lights are bright and you can’t really see who you’re playing for, but at the community venue, it’s really neat to see my professors show up and my coworkers that didn’t necessarily realize I was playing recognize that we were doing that. It felt a lot more connected to the people around me and a lot more personable than any other show ever has,” McCain said. “I’ve really seen over the course of my college career how this sort of thing really brings people together.”
Students, community members and anyone who would like to listen to live music are invited to upcoming NEHMA Dock Sessions. The next sessions of the semester will be held on Oct. 15 at 7 p.m. and Nov. 12 at 6 p.m. Sorensen aims for the events to start back up when it warms up in the spring semester and hopes this event becomes something bigger.
“We kind of envision that this becomes an ongoing, kind of a household event where people get excited for it every month,” she said.
Upcoming events will be posted on NEHMA’s Instagram account at @nehma_usuart and on the Utah State University Events Calendar, located at usu.edu/calendar.