On Saturday night, Julia Nunes played her first-ever Seattle show at the Vera Project. It probably won't be her last; the crowd adored her and, at times, overwhelmed her. (They sang so loudly and so clearly to "Build Me Up Buttercup" that a delighted Nunes retreated to singing backup to her own audience.) Nunes was in perfectly spazzy form, greeting the audience with a throaty "Hrracht" noise ("I'm not going to lie to you, ladies and gentlemen: I've got phlegm issues," she said before her dad sent a bottle of water to the stage) and cracking herself up on several occasions.

She did her cover of "Bye Bye Bye" (tossed with a "Say My Name" breakdown), but mostly she stuck to her originals, playing most of the songs off her upcoming EP, I Think You Know. The EP is her best recorded work yet, and the songs played well to a large crowd.

And the large crowd was pretty great: "This is officially the best show of the tour," Nunes announced to great applause. But the thing that every recording artist can learn from Julia Nunes is her relationship with her fans. The show was less of a concert and more of a conversation—Nunes alerted the audience that the part of the show where the encore would usually happen was coming up, and she warned them that if they went through the whole artist-leaving-the-stage-before-being-called-back-by-raucous-applause thing, she'd have less time to meet everyone after the show. So she skipped the ceremony and instead went to the merch booth, where seemingly everyone in attendance waited to talk to her and collect an autograph; the line stretched from the booth all the way to the back wall of the club.

Maybe it appealed to me because it was a combination book reading/rock concert, but I think this kind of thing, having a personal interaction with everyone, is the way certain kinds of rock shows are going to go. Nunes is creating diehard fans, one fan at a time, and that's the kind of relationship that supports an artist for decades. It's also a hell of a lot more fun than your standard rock show.