Joss Stone: Entertaining. Crazy to hear the voice of a 300-pound black woman come out of a 20-year-old white British woman. That's really all I have to say.

If the afterlife has some kind of personalized reward, my heaven will include an eternal music festival. There will be a large crowd, but still enough room to navigate while migrating from one stage to the next. There will always be a great spot to stand where my friends and family can see perfectly. The infinitely eclectic crowd will be as into the music as I am—and dancing. The schedule will be set up in a way that it is never necessary to skip one band in favor in another. Bathrooms are clean and lineless. The sound is perfect at every stage.

Bumbershoot, Seattle's 37-year-old music and arts festival held over Labor Day Weekend, is not the idealized version of my dream. In fact, much of this festival is probably on one of the circles of hell. Crowds, lines, people too cool to dance, challenges with sound....and very rough decisions on who to see and who to skip (it's tough being an obsessive music fan).

However, like that friend whom you love both in spite of and because of his flaws, Bumbershoot can be a world-class event.

The eclectic festival boasts over 200 different acts spread out over the three days of Labor Day weekend. Comedy, dance, film, spoken word, music...basically, if it can be considered art, it is probably represented in some way at Bumbershoot.

My wife and I are in our fourth year covering this festival for PLAYBACK:stl, and we have been attending it for eight. Now we have a 21-month-old child to consider while experiencing it, which significantly changes the way that we consume the festival. We used to (often literally) run around the 28-acre fairground, located in the shadow of the Space Needle, to catch different shows. As any music geek who attends a big festival knows, planning your experience takes careful planning and artful execution. There are always conflicting shows, but if you are flying solo or with a supportive co-pilot, you can really get your money's worth. The downside to that is you really only get to take a taste of everything, and deciding when to move on to the next show can be distracting.  

With a child, we tried to slow down and enjoy each artist more completely. Daisy (our daughter) further complicated matters by making life just busier in general. We didn't do as much planning for Bumbershoot this year, which meant we stuck to bands that we knew (fortunately, there were many).

We only caught music this year (our apologies to story tellers, comedians, filmmakers and dancers). Even though we could skip lines with our press passes—something we took great advantage of the past two years—we kept it real and only attended outdoor shows this year. 

Come with us, as we journey Bumbershoot.

DAY 1

Crowded House | Main Stage

These guys opened the festival for a lot of people. Neil Finn and his boys put on a solid, professional show. I was enjoying what I was hearing, but this was Bumbershoot, and I needed more groove, or at least something more unique. This is a band that puts out good solid pop-rock (and I don't mean that as a dig). After hearing "Don't Dream It's Over" and "With the Weather," I felt I needed to move on. Unfortunately, I missed Eddie Vedder's surprise appearance on "Something So Strong." Them's the Bumber-breaks.

Side comment #1: The man is everywhere: Like every other public event of the past few years, corporate sponsorship had elbowed its way into Bumbershoot like a drunk teenager stumbling into my sightline. All of the outdoor stages formerly called things like "The Rhythm Stage," "The Bumbrella Stage" or "The Blues Stage" were being called "The Sound Transit Stage," "The Esurance Stage" or "The Starbucks Stage." We refused to call them by their corporate names. We do what we can to stick it to the man, even though the man could care less.

Cave Singers | Wells Fargo Stage (formerly the Jazz Stage)

The lead singer (Pete Quirk ex-front man of Hint Hint) sounds like Ed Kowalczyk from '90s post-grunge heroes, Live, while playing the washboard, shaker, tambourine, and crazy mouth-keyboard-thing. The guitarist (former Pretty Girls Make Graves and Murder City Devils bassist Derek Fudesco) plays some finger pickin' good blues arpeggios. The percussionist (Mary Lund, formerly of Cobra High) holds it all down with some simple kick drums and high hats with some other stuff thrown in. The result is a strange, haunting, raw, sparse sound that is far from folk and close to head-nodding roots-rock.

The Shins | Main Stage

Like Modest Mouse, The Decemberists, and Death Cab for Cutie, these Portland transplants have blossomed out of small clubs and proven to mainstream radio that Pacific Northwest music did not end with grunge. They have released three solid albums full of quality songs about heartbreak and love. This was my fourth time seeing them, and I have been more underwhelmed each time. Every song is good. I want to sing along. However, I was bored; they generally play by the numbers. It is far from bad, just nothing special. I left after hearing a couple songs to find something more interesting. Nothing personal, Shins; catch ya later.

Honeydripper All-Stars | Starbucks Stage (formerly the Blues Stage)

The best antidote for the predictability of The Shins and Crowded House was some solid blues! This band of crusty bluesman, soul-singing queen and a young whippersnapper on guitar and occasional vocals showed the folks in Seattle how to get dirty. This band was formed as the "house band" for the upcoming John Sayles movie Honeydripper, which is about a couple of rival Alabama juke joints in the 1950s.

The Saturday Knights | Esurance Stage (formerly the Bumbrella Stage)

Seattle has quite the fledgling hip-hop scene these days, and this is one of the newest stars on the scene. Two MCs (Barfly and Tilson) trade lines about partying. With a DJ and a guitarist/organist, they sort of go all over the place musically and the energy stays high. They are charismatic, and the Bumbershoot crowd loved them. They lost points by playing the same song twice in a row - but it was at the behest of the crowd, proving that they just want to make people happy. Isn't that all anyone wants?

Rosie Thomas | Wells Fargo Stage

Wait a minute! That folky lady isn't Rosie Thomas! It's someone named Alela Diane. Rosie Thomas was really the only reason my wife came to Bumbershoot on Saturday. I could have seen the Avett Brothers (who I heard really good things about). So, we took advantage of our press passes and went to the "Secret Location" where KEXP was doing some exclusive performances.

Side comment #2: KEXP. Greatest. Radio. Station. Ever.

Don't take my word for it. Click on the link; listen online to this listener-supported radio station with no commercials and wish that you lived in Seattle so that you could listen to this station on any radio. They have specialty shows (blues, reggae, world, country, punk, electronic, rockabilly, jazz, hip-hop) and their regular programming is better than satellite radio. Each DJ programs their own show, and they take requests via the Internet from all over the world.

Plus, they are nonprofit and huge supporters of the music scene in the Pacific Northwest, literally sponsoring or co-sponsoring every music event of note in the area. They have also been sponsoring shows in other cities; for the past couple years, they have a "city to city" challenge. They will travel to a city where listeners donate the most money and have a live broadcast for a week. Chicago has gotten it for the past two years, with NYC coming in second. Oh yeah, they also offer podcasts of live performances, songs of the day, and random mixes similar to their programming.

Gogol Bordello (acoustic set) | KEXP's secret location

These crazy guys based in New York are actually from all over the world. They played a rare acoustic set (which you will can you can check out at KEXP's Live Performances section of their website—and you can also get this performance by signing up for the "KEXP Music that Matters Podcast").

It was great to be there to see it. They all sat on stools and played some great "gypsy" music. I believe that a true test of a band is their ability to create quality music when all of the electronics and fancy stage antics are stripped away. These guys truly showed that they are professionals. After the performance, a tired-looking Eugene Hutz took pictures with many crowd members, including my 21-month daughter Daisy who gave him high 5 and a "pound" (hitting his fist with her fist).

Menomena | Sound Transit Stage (formerly the Backyard Stage)

This Portland, Ore.-based trio had a 20ish person choir with them, and they pulled it off better than the Polyphonic Spree, whom I had been disappointed by both on albums and live. Menomena and their choir all had matching "monk"-looking outfits, and the instrumentation of the band switched around while they all sang at one time or another. These are obviously some creative guys, definitely living up to the "experimental" label that they have been given. Oftentimes, "experimental" can mean "atonal" or "musical masturbation." These guys try out lots of different things and still create some fabulously listenable and eclectic music.

The Gourds | Starbucks Stage

Since 1994, these guys from Austin, Texas, have shared their brand of alt-country with the world. They are expressive performers, with each other and with the crowd. Playing songs about their love of food, drink and women, they got the jaded Seattle crowd smiling and laughing—and they played their signature cover "Gin & Juice" to the excitement of everyone there.

Gym Class Heroes | Main Stage

If I were 15, I would think they were cool. No, wait, if I never heard 311 or any of the other rap/rock combos of the late '90s/early '00s, I would think they were awesome. They certainly have more flow than any of those bands, but it is a little too shiny for my taste.

Gogol Bordello | Esurance Stage

This was far and away my highlight of the weekend. Eugene Hutz, the lead singer, is a force to be reckoned with. On their live shows, he has been known to break bottles over his head and perform insane acts with the other band members onstage. Nothing like that happened at Bumbershoot this year. There was a huge crowd for this stage, and everyone was jumping up and down and cheering...while they were doing a sound check.

They ripped through the first part of their set with the energy of rabbits on crack. I had seen them for their acoustic set earlier, and the range that they are capable of impressed me. The music sounded just as good, but much louder. However, their onstage persona was mesmerizing. Hutz sprinted around the stage, mostly shirtless, channeling Iggy Pop. However, he was not the whole show. The fiddle player, with long curly hair and a huge beard, made faces like a crazy pirate throughout the set. One percussionist, a youngish dark skinned guy, hefted around a huge drum of some kind, while a female percussionist crashed cymbals together while doing high kicks. Their accordion player held down the cool, just putting out the music.

At the climax of the show, Hutz placed a fire pail over the mic and smacked it around with a drumstick, like he was mad at it. They did a great cover of a Mano Negra song (world music pioneers from France fronted by Manu Chao).

After the show, one of my friends commented that it seemed too much like an "act." The song "American Wedding," including such lines as "I've never been to American wedding....where's the vodka, where's the pickled herring" seem too over the top, more Borat than rock star. After all, he played the Ukrainian guide in Everything Is Illuminated.

Maybe....but throughout the entire show, the crowd was an undulating mass, jumping up and down and singing to all the songs. Seattle crowds are not generally known for being so expressive, but it was hard for anyone to stand still while the carnival of Gogol Bordello was around.