“Without small venues taking a chance, bands don’t get to the point where they can tour. If we love a band, we’ll work a shift to cut down costs. You’re not going to see that with bigger corporate venues,” says Alisha Edmsonson co-owner of Washington, DC’s Songbyrd Music House and Byrdland Records.

Co-owner Joe Lapan notes, “We’ve been here in Northeast in the Union Market neighborhood for close to five years now, seeing people enjoying independent music every night. We just celebrated our 10th anniversary as a venue last year.”

Songbyrd is the latest independent facility featured in the Raise The Stage series, created by Jai Alai IPA, the flagship beer from Cigar City Brewing in partnership with the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA). In the first Raise The Stage video Marco Benevento and Karina Rykman shared their thoughts on the Bearsville Theater. In the second, Tom Hamilton offered his perspective on the Ardmore Music Hall.

This time around it’s CJ Johnson of Oh He Dead on her local independent venue. She says of Songbyrd: “At a smaller venue we can just give them a great time and a great show and it doesn’t have to be this perfect thing. It’s just raw.”

Songbyrd is not just a music space, it’s also a record store. As noted in the video, “Songbyrd became the kind of small room where future larger stage artists pass through early enough that the audience still feels like it discovered them. Artists like Khalid, Big Thief, Laufey, Tyler Childers, Tank and the Bangas and Lola Young. Songbyrd’s secret weapon is that the relationship doesn’t end when the set ends. The room and the record store keep feeding each other. Artists play the stage, their records land in the bins. The next listener discovers them before they even buy a ticket.”

“People I run into on tour go, ‘Hey, I went to this record store in DC and they have your stuff everywhere.’ And I’m like, ‘That just means so much,'” Johnson affirms. “Especially when you’re not home that makes you feel good that people can go to your city and know who you are because they went to this one record store,”

“As a small venue, our job is to give the best sound and the best experience so that people walk away saying, “Oh my God, that band was amazing,” Edmsonson indicates.

Indeed, as Raise The Stage emphasizes, “That is the work independent venues do best. They give artists a place to try things before everything has to be perfect.”