*protected email*
A few days before Songbird officially opens its doors to media and friends and family, Meg Paradise and Charlie Blue Arm invited me out for a first look at the space, camera in hand, before the grand-opening chaos rolls in and everyone starts fighting for the good angles.
The place already has that rare, almost unfair advantage of looking lived-in before it even opens—like somebody has taken an old Raleigh building, peeled back a few layers of its previous lives, then filled it with reclaimed wood, local pottery, moody lighting, serious coffee equipment, bar toys that look like they escaped from a science lab, and enough thoughtful little details to make you realize this isn’t some plug-and-play concept dropped into East End Market…