Photo Courtesy of Telluride Inside

And then I said to myself—but what is a Java? I can imagine some of the more rigorous philosophers pondering this question as the candle burnt close to the wick. Descartes would probably say that it is made of both the mental and the physical, the Java being the mental and the Barn being the physical. The Java cannot think outside of the Barn, and the Barn cannot think at all. Well Rene, there’s this crazy thing called the Internet that knows everything and more than you do about a Java!

There are three things the internet has to say about the word Java—that it is an informal way of referring to coffee, that Java is an island off of Indonesia, and that it is a type of computer-programming language.

If we are to know Java as she truly is, I’d say we must let her come to us. And she does, once or twice a week. This time around, she came under the guise of The Congress, a band hailing from the Colorado Rockies’ port town of Denver. While they are a rock ‘n’ roll band, their jivvy sound-bite chomps down on a different part of your insides than most rock. Their music is like a well-written speech; it woos you, it’s persuasive, gets at your tender side. It makes you feel sexy even if all you’re wearing is sweatpants and crocs.

Up from the sound booth, the crowd looked like a small, tightly packed pacifist army, full of ganglers and doodle-brains ready to roll around and shake their fingers. YEAH, a looott of people showed up. Don’t worry, the carrots in the snack bowls felt pretty pinched too. But no matter! We enjoyed ourselves and the show all the same, if not more.

A beaming and lovely gal, Emily Hoffman ’18, was my credible source for the week (this is what I like to call, “airbrushing my memory”). She explained how the band did an incredible job on the cover track—Alicia Keys, The Talking Heads, and Fleetwood Mac made guest appearances via Congress vocal chords. Did you hear that rendition of Lake Street Dive’s “Bad Self Portraits”? Notes don’t get as high as hot air balloons ‘cept on Fridays at the Barn. Not to mention their own music, that hot track “Killing Me Softly” is LOVE. If you and Jimi Hendrix were ever to have a glass of milk in a velvet curtained room with amber lighting, this would be your song.

At one point the lead singer said how excited he was to be playing at Java! “There is nothing that is like the Barn,” I might hear him prophesize in my head. He might have dove into the crowd. This is more of an intuitive claim that a fact. But for the sake of the story, we’re just going to say he did.

Overall, awesome set. You can tell that as musicians The Congress is a band that loves what they do. They were there to jam and create a musical bus-ride experience that anyone could hop onto; what you heard about Friday is the real deal, folks at home.

So just remember this– when you graduate and you leave this world behind, and you’re sitting at your office job playing solitaire doing the nine to five—just remember, my friend, you sat in on a session of congress…Barn style.