The Comet. The Comet is one of my favorite bars in Seattle. It feels, vaguely, like the inside of a barn - high ceilings with wood beams, cavernous. The walls are covered with years and years of skeletal graffiti - spare white and black letters, sparse phrasing. The Comet is one of those bars on Capitol Hill, of which there are several, where you step through the doors and it still feels like the nineties. Men in their late thirties and early forties standing around the pool table in leather jackets and flannel. Women in Doc Martens and babydoll dresses. This is a subsection of Seattle fashion anyway, but in the Comet it is worn with a certain attitude. Know-how.

The other cool thing about this bar is the stage, sagging under the rafters, which generally hosts a band or three or four, on any given night. Local or regional or coastal.

Gardens and Villa are a band from Santa Barbara who I saw for the first time in the fall, opening for Drew's former band. They have a drummer and a bassist and a keyboardist and a vocalist/flutist, and they echo and pop and make you want to dance. Their music is sun incarnate.

There are not too many bands that I want to see more than once. But Gardens and Villa...I would see them anytime. Anytime. At the Comet, feeling like it is twenty years ago, being one of four dancers swirling in the gap at the front of the bar as the stoic Seattle crowd hangs back. As the singer says over and over again, after each song, "Thank you guys for dancing! Thank you, thank you for dancing!" Or anywhere they wind up as they maybe, maybe, get bigger. They are a very good band.