Aerin Monroe

I was at the Downtown Berkeley BART station on Friday looking forward to the ride home after work, taking the escalator down from the street to the first level of the station.  I was standing, allowing the escalator to do the work, and I had my earphones in.  When I got to the bottom of the escalator I see in front of me a guy playing the guitar and singing.  There are very often musicians of some type playing in this spot right in front of the escalator, and I usually make a quick effort to listen.  So I popped out my standard issue iPhone earphones and gave this guy a shot.  I'm not totally sure, but even before removing my earphones, I may have heard something from this guy that compelled me to remove the earphones.  I don't know.  In any case, I listened to the song he was playing, just him singing and playing an acoustic guitar.  He was sitting on a chair and he had his black, soft guitar bag in front of him with a few burned cds and quite a few dollar bills.  He was African-American, looked about 20 years old, and had kindof a reaggae vibe in terms of his clothing and cap, with one little lock of hair peeping out.  His song was folksy.  It sounded like this:



Fuck.  This guy is good.  So I stood about five feet away in my bright yellow, button down work shirt, people filing by to get from the escalator to the bart gates and the stairs down to the tracks.  So I'm like okay, this is really fucking good.  But what about song #2?  Is this guy a one hit wonder or can he come up with the goods again.  And his second song was great, totally great.  I stood and listened to the whole song, maybe four minutes.  After he finished, I went over to him, dropped a $10 bill in his guitar case and picked up a burned cd.  I said something like:

"Good shit, man.  Are you gigging?"

He was real cool and said, "well yeah, but nothing big, just coffee shops and open mics and shit.  Not really trying to play the Warfield or anything." and he laughed.

And I said, "Why not?"  and I smiled, then I said, "keep playin' man." and I left.

I'm so happy I stopped to listen.  I'm now in the process of trying to bring his music to the world.  But that's not really off the ground yet; I'll keep you posted.

with so much fucking love for people who go out to bart stations and play music, it's still the right thing to do,
Anthony