Rebecca Loebe at the Crystal Theatre — Woody Guthrie Folk Festival

Self-Styled “Post-Brontosaurus Indie Folk/​Crunk” Artist Captivates Audience

It didn’t really sound like my kind of thing, but then again I hap­pened to be home that week­end so I didn’t have a good excuse not to at least go to the audition.

As singer-song­writer Rebecca Loebe told the audi­ence at the Crystal Theatre this past July, she didn’t mean to become a best-sell­ing artist. But with over 35,000 down­loads of her sin­gle (her audi­tion song for NBC’s The Voice, a cover of Nirvana’s Come As You Are) on iTunes, she’s an unqual­i­fied suc­cess. Already a tour­ing musi­cian with 2 EPs and 2 LPs under her belt, the Austin-based per­former so impressed the show’s celebrity coaches Adam Levine and Christina Aguilera that they both offered to men­tor her for the competition.

Even before that, she was impress­ing audi­ences and crit­ics, gar­ner­ing a win in the Grassy Hill New Folk Songwriting Competition at the Kerrville Folk Festival. As if that wasn’t enough, her 2^nd full-length release spend 9 weeks in the Top 40 of the Americana Chart and 8 weeks in the Top 10 of the Euro Americana Chart before it was rec­og­nized in the Americana Music Association’s List of the Top 100 Albums of 2010.

She’s also very funny — I heard a lot of laugh­ter in the Crystal Theatre audi­ence, both at her intro­duc­tions and inter­jec­tions to the songs and at her deliv­ery of cer­tain droll lyrics. Thanksgiving, a warn­ing to poten­tial suit­ors, made me put my cam­era down because I was laugh­ing so hard. This was Loebe’s 1^st appear­ance at the festival. 

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