I spent the past weekend at Sappyfest, a little music festival in Sackville, New Brunswick. This is a place 10 hours east of Montreal - not at the end of the world, like Dawson City, but far enough away that boy do you have to want to be there. And boy did I want to be there. Sappyfest is the sincerest festival in the world. It is about small, not big. It is about building magical moments, instead of gesturing toward the impossible. If Coachella and Osheaga create bacchanalian amusement parks, songs sounding from every corner; and Pop Montreal is a city turned treasure map, a hundred Xs strewn through Montreal's clubs; then Sappyfest is just a town. It hosts musicians, newcomers, old friends. It asks everyone to simply build something together: a weekend apart from every other weekend.

The slogan of the 2009 festival was, A FIRE STORM FROM THE 5TH DIMENSION. And in 2010, SWAMP MAGIC.

Go with friends. Have fun. Hear songs you have never heard before.

Like last year, Sappyfest invited me to Sackville to write something called Sappy Times. At the end of every day, from 2-5am, I would go back to my room and rub my eyes and try to set down my thoughts. And in the morning, Paul & the volunteers would print these scrawls, spread them through town. A newspaper about yesterday. A sappy collective diary.

For those of you who were not there, or who missed an issue or two, here they are, for posterity:

Erratum: The Saturday issue describes a performance by the Chinstraps, joining Purple Knight at a ramshackle roller-derby in the Sackville Civic Centre. This was not Chinstraps: it was Adam Mowery.

The festival highlights include: Shotgun Jimmie, Spider-Man wrestling a luchador (as documented in Saturday); CFL Sessions, Etaoin Shrdlu, PS I Love You, Horses, Jim Guthrie, Snailhouse, the Silt (as documented in Sunday); Cousins, Michelle McAdorey, BJ Snowden, Shapes & Sizes, Sloan's surprise performance of Twice Removed in full (as documented in Monday).

Thank you to Paul Henderson, Jon Claytor, Steve Lambke, Shotgun Jimmie, and everyone who made this happen.

(Sappy Times photo by Chris Campbell, a total stranger.)