On the night of Friday March 15, students gathered in the Bingham house common room for an evening of live music. The two organizers of the show—Blair Jasper and Lily Gibson—each performed a set, along with Marina Fleming and Olivia Phillips, all seniors living in Bingham.
Marina Fleming opened the night, singing and playing the acoustic guitar. Her first song, “Kiss,” Fleming said, was “about a Bennington make-out gone wrong. Unrequited love. I don’t know—you might relate to it.”
Next, Fleming played a song told, “from the point of view of a daughter, who’s maybe 19, writing a letter to her mother after she’s run away to become a groupie. So, there’s a lot of angst, and guilt, and it was really fun to write.”
Trying to decide between two songs to perform, Fleming asked the audience, “Are people feeling more, like, sad, but full circle moment, or, like, angsty, fuck-you-forever?” The audience chose the latter. “Okay,” Fleming said. “Then you shall get that.”
Fleming finished her set with a sing-along cover of the Lana Del Rey song “Normal Fucking Rockwell,” dedicating the performance to “the lovely men of Bennington. The straight men, that is. I feel like they really understand this song. Intimately.”
Next was Blair Jasper, performing under the name Bark Dog, singing and playing the electric guitar. Jasper opened their set with a Mathew Lee Cothran cover, then asked the audience if they had any requests. “Rory,” someone said—one of Jasper’s original songs. “You knew I was about to play that though, right?” Jasper asked, laughing. “There’s the request.”
Jasper ended their set with two songs—“brass tax” and “perpetual state of disbelief”—from their upcoming album, i’ll eat you, i love you, to be released on March 27. “I’m really happy for that to be coming out really soon,” Jasper said.
Lily Gibson, performing under the name Lily May, played next, singing and on the acoustic guitar. “This is actually my first solo set on this campus,” Gibson said. “And the first set with my official artist name.”
For her second song, Gibson was joined by Finnian McLaughlin on the electric guitar. “I wrote this song to be a busking song,” Gibson said. “It’s meant for guitar and fiddle. [Bennington professor and fiddler] John Kirk couldn’t come”—the crowd giggled. “[No,] I didn’t ask him,” Gibson clarified. “But I was like, Finn—Two, three, four days ago, I was like, Finn…”
Gibson finished with a song called “You.” “I didn’t write the words,” Gibson said. “My late uncle wrote them. He was also a musician. After he passed away, we were going through a lot of photos and things of his, and we found a folder of his song lyrics. To our knowledge, we don’t think we have any songs to go with these lyrics. So as part of my senior work, I decided to take this song and some others, and make a song.”
Olivia Phillips closed out the night singing and on electric guitar. “It’s been so fun to listen to these other three incredible artists and housemates of mine, and fellow seniors. It’s really exciting and weird that’s it’s almost over. The show, but I meant, like”—Phillips was interrupted by Gibson, sitting in the audience. “Don’t say that! Don’t say that, don’t say that,” Gibson said, laughing. “Not until after the show. Not until the show is over.”
Phillips’s final song was “[written] about a year ago, at the end of my Field Work Term when I was living in New York,” Phillips said. “This is a song about going to Coney Island in the middle of winter with two of my friends, Charlie and Izzy. And it was just both of their birthdays, so this song is for them.”
In conversation after the show, Jasper reflected on the event. “We have a great, musical house. It was a bit haphazard, just because people were sick, and we had to reschedule it, but that’s what I like about the house show vibe. It’s so easy to bring community together and just make something happen,” Jasper said. “I’ve always loved doing that. That’s been one of my favorite things to do here. Just to put on shows. Makes me so happy.”
A recording of the show can be found on the Bark Dog YouTube channel.
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