PORT ANGELES — Since the band Hey Marseilles got together, the sextet has played the Sasquatch, Bumbershoot and South by Southwest music festivals, cut a couple of records and toured North America.
Next stop: the Port Angeles Library at 7 p.m. Friday.
How is it that Hey Marseilles, the Seattle band well known for a distinctive orchestral folk-pop, got booked here for a free concert?
Turns out Matt Bishop, the lead singer, and Noah Glaude, Port Angeles Main Library manager, went to the University of Washington together.
Bishop was Glaude’s resident adviser at McCarty Hall dormitory.
“I saw Matt play many solo shows around campus back then,” before Hey Marseilles formed in 2006, Glaude recalled.
Since then, he’s watched the band take off, via Facebook.
Then he saw a video of Hey Marseilles playing in a New York City subway station, “and realized they would be perfect for the library.”
Perfect, that is, for the North Olympic Library System’s goal of attracting new patrons.
Glaude contacted Bishop and invited him and the band to Port Angeles for what’s called the Art Blast, an event, often with live music, that happens every quarter.
Hey Marseilles’ concert is part of the slate of events funded by the Friends of the Library, Glaude emphasized.
The Friends, through their book sales and other fundraising, help pay for the Art Blasts and other free activities.
This Friday’s Art Blast, as is traditional, also features a newly mounted display of local artists’ work, with a free reception and refreshments at 6:30 p.m. at the library, 2210 S. Peabody St.
This spring show brings together art by Cindy Elstrom, Jack Galloway, Pam Russell, John Teichert and Port Angeles High School students Bailey Beckett and Bob Simpson.
When asked about the band’s name, Bishop said it doesn’t really have much to do with the French city of Marseilles. The musicians just liked the sound of it and liked that it’s rhyming and mysterious.
At the library, the band will offer songs from their first and second albums, such as “Rio,” “Heart Beats” and “Bright Hearts Burning,” and some from the CD they’re about to record.
Friday’s gig is one of only a few the band has on its schedule, as the players — singer-guitarist Bishop, accordionist Philip Kobernik, Jacob Anderson on viola and bass, guitarist-mandolinist Nick Ward, drummer Colin Richey and Samuel Anderson on cello — are about to go into the production studio.
For information about Hey Marseilles’ concert and other free activities across the North Olympic Library System, see www.NOLS.org, phone 360-417-8500 or visit one of the public libraries in Port Angeles, Forks, Sequim and Clallam Bay.
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
