At around midnight last night, Sarah Rudinoff sang two songs to a crowd of about 30 people at CHAC’s Lower Level without a microphone. She was accompanied by the 23-year-old principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony, Joshua Roman. (He’s the youngest principal musician in the orchestra’s history.) The first song they did was Joni Mitchell’s The Last Time I Saw Richard…

He told me all romantics meet the same fate someday
Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark cafe…

…and then they did Fiona Apple’s “Not About Love.” (It’s easier to use a piano as percussion than it is to use a cello, but Roman did it—by hitting it.) Rudinoff told the crowd, “Fiona Apple’s my guilty pleasure.”

The other performers were mostly classical musicians and poets—it was a benefit for the Pride Foundation, thrown by local arts-fundraising extraordinaire Josef Krebs—and afterward Rudinoff was mobbed. A white rapper chick told Rudinoff not to be ashamed for liking Fiona Apple, and Rudinoff said, “Oh, I’m not. I’m loud and proud about it.” (It must be said: Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine is a great album.) More than one person asked Rudinoff when she was going to record an album of some kind, and she said, “I’m working on a four-track demo that I can shop around.” Also: she’s going to record some stuff with Roman. Awesome.