Georgia Harmer and her band couldn't decide whether to keep their sunglasses on during their early-evening performance at Highlands. Halfway through their set Harmer took them off, but swiftly put them back on, and it formed a delicious sort of contrast: her and her band's rock star look, lent by the hard contours of their sunglasses, commingled with and delivering her soft, diaphanous sound.
Harmer stood still in the centre of the Amphitheatre stage for the duration of her performance, flanked by her band, and as the sun set over the water down the hill, it felt as though something heavenly was taking place. She performed tracks off her debut album, 2022's Stay in Touch, along with tracks off an upcoming album she completed only days before the festival. One of the new songs she performed was called "Little Light." As the slanting rays of the setting sun gilt every harsh edge within the hamlet-like setting of the Amphitheatre in glimmering gold, Harmer sang in her heathery voice of small pockets of treasured space, the beautiful mundanity it conceals, being lit up by "little light."
"That song was written about a place like this," she said, as if she herself couldn't get over the serendipity of it all. "This is a lot of little light. I wish you could see how you all look." Her performance, with great kindness, carried and bestowed the love of her lyrics: she settled the feathery weight of awe in the face of a life deeply felt graciously into our laps. To listen to a Georgia Harmer song is to have ignited in you a desire to cherish the little moments — watching the dust dancing in morning light as you wake up, looking up at the night sky and following the milky trails of galaxies, the meaning of cut fruit — that make up a big life, to tongue their heft, to be present fully within each second. To listen to Georgia Harmer live is to be suffused with a renewed desire to live, to want to live life as intently and purely as she does, to see the world through her sensitive eyes. And to listen to Harmer live at Highlands — well that's just an indescribable treasure.
Watching Harmer perform as the day inched toward night, it felt as though we were being taught to see like her. She, with her gauzy words and keen remembrances of pain and love and loss, seemed to remind us, perhaps even ask us, to remember this, this special little weekend spent on a camp secreted away in a place seemingly cut off from the mess of everyday life. She seemed to turn our gazes simultaneously inward and outward, reminding us with her beautiful words laced with a Proustian reverie, to remember to remember, to take time to actively wrap each of the moments at this festival up in the wrapping paper of our memories, and make sure to gift them to our future selves.
As Harmer stood in the Amphitheatre, rooted within the ephemeral, she saw the moment's magic, and blessed us twofold with the heavenly: first, her performance, and second, a reminder to cherish the minutiae and live life with passion.