With Treefort Music Festival only two weeks away, the Student Union Performance Series (SUPS) wizards joined forces with the Treefort organizers and held a preview show on Thursday, March 7.
Grandma Kelsey and Sun Blood Stories, two of the bands to play at the festival, played for anyone interested.
Amy Rajkovich, a first-year graduate student and the student union fine arts program assistant, helped put the show together.
“This one in particular was easy,” she said. “I worked with Eric Gilbert and he puts on Treefort.”
The preview show began with a performance from Grandma Kelsey, a one-woman band composed of Kelsey Swope and her guitar.
Between songs, Swope bantered about her time as a student at Boise State, and how strange it felt to be back on campus.
After a brief intermission at the end of Grandma Kelsey’s performance, Sun Blood Stories took the stage. Their sound is almost the complete opposite direction of Grandma Kelsey’s, one that was gritty and southern, with a lead singer whose voice was reminiscent of Tom Waits. In fact, Treefort helped to inspire the revamp of the Student Performance Series.
“I went last year, and it fueled the new Student Performance Series,” Rajkovich said. Before this year, the Student Performance Series was mostly classical music, but Rajkovich helped to revamp it into a more modern, student-friendly type
of show.
“I get a lot of ideas of who to get to come to campus with (Treefort’s) lineup,” she said.
A kickoff to Treefort Festival will take place on campus at the Centennial Amphitheater on March 21.
For more information on this and other performances visit finearts.boisestate.edu.
