The Sunset Tavern hosted a benefit concert on Friday, October 26th for Proper Groove, a local organization working to stop sex-based and bias-based violence through implementing preventive training, providing support services, and advocating for legislative change within local communities. This lineup materialized after the original headliner of the night, Motopony, announced it was cancelling the remainder of its 2018 shows after accusations of sexual assault surfaced.

First up, Whitney Ballen donned an exceptionally honest demeanor on stage, wearing an oversized army jacket and pointing her feet slightly inward, yet playing music alone unabashedly and comfortably in front of an absorbed crowd. At times, she stepped back from the mic while she sang, weaving layers of pining separation between her music and her audience. She muddled the clarity of her voice and her strumming, painting a vivid picture of hurt through her presence as opposed to her lyrics. Her vocal tone was light, thin, and porous — as if the emotions in her lyrics were climbing up her throat in real time. She was the embodiment of all our emotional toils, becoming an outlet for those toils to escape. The sincerity in her imperfection made it seem like she was only jamming in her bedroom — like she was the ghost of our past teenage desires. Ballen was present, real, and approachable, punctuating her set with quirky thoughts about her songs and how she wrote them.

Much of Ballen’s set came from her most recent release, “You’re a Shooting Star, I’m a Sinking Ship” — an expression of the challenges of comparing oneself to an ex, and it’s also some freaking stellar breakup music. Her lyrics translated into words many thoughts about interpersonal and intrapersonal struggles: reliving the good times (“Mountain”), facing the absence of those good times (“Rainier”), and being saddled with the heavy reality of an ex moving onto someone else (“Fucking”). Her character felt omni-relatable, yet far enough away to be just out of reach. Her honesty melted me, and it felt like a micro-breakup when she finished playing and left the stage.

Kelli Schaefer followed with a similar genuity, but a different delivery. While Ballen floated into the lighter sound of playing solo, Schaefer dove into alternative ways to bring to life the savory texture of her music; she was unafraid to belt melodies and support them with an accompaniment of pedal effects that harmonized her at octave intervals and filled the room with reverb. She reinvented the tracks from her studio recordings tastefully, paying attention to the hierarchy of roles and rearranging them as needed to create a dynamic range of sounds. Her sheer volume initially took the room by surprise, but it wasn’t long before Schaefer found a groove.

There were distinct moments during Schaefer’s set when she appeared to be anywhere but on stage. However, she cleverly left hints in her lyrics as to her whereabouts. During one song, tension rose as the lyrics asked for answers with fervent desperation; when she departed for the guitar solo, her gaze shot above the crowd and through the back of the room. As her intensity grew, her stare flattened as her neck began to shudder, followed by her entire head convulsing, increasingly more volatile all the while. For those fifteen seconds, Schaefer was all but possessed by her music. Later in the set, she came to the lyric, “they didn’t like you ‘cause you didn’t do what you should’ve done;” with this line, her face creased inward as if subjected to a tangible weight from those unmet expectations.

With the end of her set, Schaefer gave the stage to the show’s beneficiary, Proper Groove. Board members Ta Pemgrove and Autumn Halliwell spoke on behalf of the organization, giving a deeper insight into the work they do and their rationale for doing it. Pemgrove touched on their program of bar bystander intervention training, which prepares people for dangerous events in bar scenes and gives them tools to intervene and de-escalate situations before they can lead to violence. She briefly added that she herself has experienced the fears and dangers of the nightlife bar scene — a reason for both why she is in this work as well as how she handles it.

After a brief break, headliner Alex Niedzialkowski of Cumulus modestly graced the stage and effortlessly continued the evening’s style of yearning earnesty. She barely finished the first of her dream-pop tracks when she did a quick sound check, referring to the feedback in her speaker as a “gobblin” coming through the sound. With a bubbly giggle and no hesitation, she jumped right back into her set and lulled the audience into a daydream melodrama. Filtering through some chorus and reverb effects, she created a space around her that felt more like an afternoon scrunched together on a couch than a Friday-night show. The feeling of reminiscent nostalgia hung thick like a palpable fog in the air — a fantasy begging to stay — and her vocals and guitar blended seamlessly, . No joke, I was so engaged that I forgot to take notes during a chunk of her set.

What struck me about Niedzialkowski was that it was actually her on stage: a real person at the mic who laughed, expressed her fears, and responded to the world. She considered the political climate around sexuality and orientation for a moment, revealing, “I feel like my friends are at risk of dying.” Though Niedzialkowski didn’t attribute the comment to any particular event, I remembered the anxiety of friends in the LGBT community expressing their fears about the current administration two years ago. She later echoed this feeling with the painful lyric, “do you want to kill my friends?” Musically, a lapping tide; sentimentally, a sharp knife.

Later, she presented a quick anecdote about how a would-be demo actually ended up being the final release version of one of her songs. She recorded what she needed to convey an idea using only a $50 mic, and an afternoon bedroom session produced a media-quality result. This story was only a quick pause in the music, but it spoke to the night as a whole. It seems many people see making music — and the fight against sexual assault — as something distant, untouchable, and far away from anything they could do. However, the smallest of desires can generate the largest of impacts. It may sound obvious, but in order to change something, something different must be done. It’s up to each of us to strive for the changes we seek, as well as to hold those accountable for the changes we don’t.