Unauthorized

The next day was a full one. It began with a small, intimate, mid-day concert featuring Colbie Caillat, performing work from her ruminative, hazy-days-of-summer effort The Malibu Sessions. (The album itself begins and ends with ocean sounds recorded off the Malibu coastline). While a small, polite crowd of ticket winners and radio programmers made their way to the intimate venue, I stood back and wondered what it must be like for an artist to play a venue such as this one. Caillat emerged for her set fresh-faced and seemingly at ease. She performed alongside her fiancé, Justin Young, and chatted easily and often with the small crowd. During “Try”, an empowering ballad she co-wrote with Babyface, the crowd seemed particularly still and moved. After her set, we all dispersed and reappeared at the next venue, Biale Vineyards, along Napa’s Big Ranch Road corridor.

There, among a rustic winery and vineyard setting, we again gathered, this time on hay bales and wooden farm tables, to listen to Mike Posner perform his popular hits “I Took a Pill in Ibizia”, “Be As You Are” and “Buried in Detroit.” I happen to be a big Posner fan, so this was the highlight of the weekend for me. Posner, who is a self-effacing, Detroit-born, tender and toughened performer, was joined by the young trumpet playing genius, Spencer Ludwig, who improvised his way through “I Took a Pill in Ibizia”, while Posner looked on, pleased, strumming his guitar. Ludwig’s lithe body, dressed all in black, and topped off with a stylish black hat, cut quite a figure in an otherwise very rural environment. The two created no small amount of melodic magic together that afternoon.

Also joining Posner that day was Stanaj (pictured left), a genteel, handsome, young performer, possessing of some silly swagger, as well, whose meteoric rise in recent months culminated in a much-viewed appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” earlier this year. He performed “Romantic” a modern-day torch song, with a small grove of oak trees and a vineyard as his background. The afternoon at Biale Vineyards was rounded out by James TW, performing his chart-topper “When You Love Someone”, which has lit up the UK charts and is steadily climbing the charts stateside. It’s a heart wrenching song that James TW wrote for a young student (he used to be a music teacher) whose parents were divorcing at the time. His performance was stripped down and raw, and left more than a handful of audience members in tears.

After the crowd dispersed, we made our way back to the hotel in Napa where a number of Napa wineries hosted a grand tasting in the hotel’s courtyard. I sneaked out of the tasting early to rest up for that evening’s concert at downtown Napa’s historic Uptown Theatre. That night, a startlingly great line up of performers, which included Calum Scott, JOHNNYSWIM, Wrabel, Phillip Phillips and O.A.R., performed to an enthusiastic, packed house. On Saturday, small break-out performances by Drake White, Brendan James and Zach Heckendorf, to name just a few, took place in St. Helena, while back at the Uptown Theatre that evening, The Rua, Walking on Cars, Mike Posner, Pete Yorn and Blue October took the stage for yet another crowd-pleasing, foot-stomping, high-energy show.

On Sunday morning, the final day of “Live in the Vineyard” we all descended on Liana Estates, a small winery in the Carneros appellation of the Napa Valley, to listen to an elegant, highly-anticipated performance by Idina Menzel (“Let it Go”, “Defying Gravity”) off her new album, Idina. A deeply personal body of work that she tackled after a difficult divorce, it’s my favorite work by Menzel to date. I found the lead single off the album, “Queen of Swords,” to be immediately likeable and relatable upon the first listening.