It was the strangest damn experience.

There I was, sitting at a hooka bar around midnight with a friend. The place was packed full up, and everyone was talking. Sometimes the conversations of those sitting around us were too loud for my friend and I to have a conversation, but that was what happened on Fridays. The music is controlled via iPod, and one of the guys who works at the bar went to change the music. I thought it would be another techno thing that was so popular or some remote 90's band that makes the young kids feel cool and makes me feel REALLY old... but it wasn't.

It started out with soft piano music, and a voice that was a bit more than that. The music kept building. The voice got more serious. It just kept going. I tuned in so specifically to the music that I failed to notice that everything thing else fell silent. Every discussion fell to the want to hear this man speak. No one moved. We sat frozen listening to a familiar tale about a convenience store in North Dakota that none of us had ever been to and likely never see and yet we were all there.

It was amazing.

I had no choice but to find out who it was. The guy who works there smiled widely as I stood from the booth chair and walked across the smoky room. "His name is Buddy Wakefield" he said when I was close enough to hear.

He is a national slam poetry champion, but his album Run on Anything is classified by iTunes as rock. The album was released in 2006, and it is amazing. At least it has been for me. I suggest giving it a listen.