NEW LIVE CONCERT SERIES FILMING IN OLY >>>

I recently visited The Evergreen State College to meet with the individuals behind the local concert series, Olympia Winter Nights. Upon sitting down with the show's creators, talk does not begin with logistics, planning or any of the other topics one might expect to start off an interview. Instead, we talk about winter.

"The winter is dark, people stay indoors," explains Evergreen student and audio studio intern Scott Tipton. "And we built (Olympia Winter Nights) to coordinate with the winter season."

Tipton says it was important to incorporate the idea of winter into the Olympia Winter Nights (OWN for short) for a couple of reasons. Not only will OWN, a live concert series in the vein of PBS's "Austin City Limits," be shot in the winter, but he also believes that the dreary Olympia winters serve as a source of inspiration for area artists. It is this wintery inspiration he hopes to foster, and capture, with OWN.

"You got to have something to do in the winter months," says Tipton. "And we wanted to provide something to do in the winter months."

The first of the four episodes is scheduled to start at 8 p.m. on Jan 14. The first show will open with guitarist Patrick Meyer playing an acoustic guitar. The second act will be the Curious Mystery, a band on Olympia's K Records label. There are about 30 open spots in the CCAM studio for spectators to come watch the performance in studio.

Check out the full story, including extensive interviews with those behind OWN, in this Thursday's issue of the Weekly Volcano.