CANDACE DEVINE

Please see below.

Well, here we are. It’s taken a couple days for me to completely process what it means to sing on stage one last time before they close and then reopen somewhere new in 2027.
Here are a few clips of me, singing a song by the master vocalist , not in my best voice, but this night is not about that. This night is about people gathering together to sing out loud and share two hours of unbridled joy in a communal way. I believe that is the only reason this night has lasted for 10 years, and will likely last for 10 more in a new place.
I told this story on stage before singing this song, but it was 11 years ago that I had moved to Arizona to join my husband who had moved there about a year and a half prior. We had our son, we started a new chapter of our life, leaving everything and everyone we had known back in LA. My band that I had been touring in for years dissolved, and I really wasn’t sure if I would ever sing again. called me and said, I think there are still people who would want to hear you sing and you should come out and join this night I want to put together with a bunch of our friends singing songs everyone can belt at the top of their lungs.
Coffee Shop Arena Rock was born.
Instantaneously, I remembered why I loved singing so much. I remembered why I could never live a life without singing. I remembered what the power of music and community feels like. I re-learned how healing it is to share a common experience through music with people you don’t know and people you love.
It’s powerful.
I very humbly present snippets of this performance with all its perfect flaws. Because I live in Arizona, I always drive in and jump on stage and only every once in a while get a chance to rehearse with the band if I’m in town early enough to do it. So when I get up there, it’s always a phenomenal wild ride and inevitably unexpected things happen. In this instance, the band and I learned slightly different versions of the song which we realized on stage, the microphone cord fell out of my mic mid song, but we were all in it together and you couldn’t pay me to change one thing.