THE BLOG.

At the front, cables curl across the floor between microphones, speakers and instruments. Musicians drift in and out as they are needed, stepping into songs they may not have rehearsed and sometimes have never heard. To the left, Jackson works the soundboard from a post that doubles as another instrument. His seat is a drum. Without leaving the controls, he can lean into the rhythm.

At the microphone is Donnie Deneil.

He is MCing tonight, introducing performers and carrying the room through the pauses between them. Then his own voice enters — soulful, elastic, moving between pop, rock and R&B.

Around him, the usual divisions of a venue begin to blur. People dance in the narrow spaces left open. Strangers exchange social media accounts. Old friends lean toward one another in corners. Some step outside to smoke, where the cyphers continue beneath conversations and passing traffic, then slip back through the door when they hear something they do not want to miss.

There is a jam midway through Live Mic. There is another after every name on the list has been called. By then, the structure of the night has started to loosen. A person who came to watch can move closer. Someone who arrived too late to sign up can still find a microphone. A musician begins a progression, and other people enter it one instrument, one voice, one instinct at a time.

For Deneil, that opening once made the difference between going home unknown and finding what he now calls family.

He first came to Live Mic in October 2022 after a friend told him about it. She was supposed to meet him there but never showed. Deneil had also invited his friend and Duck bandmate Chris, who canceled.

He could leave, or he could walk into an unfamiliar room alone.

“You know what? Fuck it. I’ma go anyway,” Deneil remembered thinking.

He had moved from Wilmington in November 2019 and was still trying to find his place in Raleigh’s live music scene. He had been visiting open mics around the area, but when he entered Lucky Tree that night, every face was new.

“I didn’t know anybody at the time,” he said.

He was also too late to put his name on the performance list.

Then the end jam began.

Deneil sang.

“And then I just started going,” he said.

Nearly four years later, he sometimes stands at the front of that same room as its MC. The strangers he met there have become some of his closest friends.

“I consider them family,” he said.

Most open mics, Deneil said, are more rigid. There is a list, a sequence and an ending. Lucky Tree makes room for music at the beginning, middle and end — room for whatever the list could not predict.

“The jam is for the folks who didn’t make it on the list, didn’t get a chance to sign up, but they still have an opportunity to get on the mic and bust a move,” Deneil said.

The list decides who performs first.
It does not decide who belongs.

Henderson, 22, has written songs since high school. She began with piano, then reached toward other instruments. Her first stringed instrument was a mandolin. She walked into a Guitar Center, picked one up and recognized something in it immediately.

“This feels like me,” she remembered thinking.

For years, much of Henderson’s energy had gone into intensive ballet training. When an injury ended that chapter, music became somewhere else for the feeling to go. She describes it as cathartic — a release for what her body once translated through dance. Now studying digital media and design and psychology online at Southeastern University, she continues to build her musical life beyond a formal conservatory or program.

Community, however, cannot be practiced alone.

Henderson has spent time in other music scenes and at other open mics, where artists can seem to watch one another through a thin film of competition. At Lucky Tree, she felt that film dissolve.

“Everyone is here to experience each other’s art and share with each other and support each other,” Henderson said.

That support, she said, has made the cafe “very instrumental to the Raleigh music scene — no pun intended.”

For Perm Bryan, arriving took years.

Bryan, whose birth name is Evelin Kembe, was born and raised in Raleigh. She studied theater at N.C. A&T in Greensboro, lived in Asheville and moved to New York before eventually returning home. Even while she was elsewhere, Lucky Tree remained on her phone — a place she watched through Instagram and through the posts of local musicians.

“I’ve been following the Instagram page for I don’t know how many years now,” Bryan said.

The cafe was familiar as an image: art packed against the walls, performers at the microphone, faces gathered close. Still, she kept postponing the actual visit. After she moved back to Raleigh, curiosity began to feel more like insistence.

“Oh my God, something has to lead me here,” she remembered thinking.

Her first visit was only a week before she was interviewed.

She had already returned.

The artwork drew her eye. The unusual interior gave her something to study. Neither brought her back.

“It’s more so the people,” Bryan said. “Like, if I didn’t fuck with y’all the last time, I would not be back.”

Unfamiliar rooms can be difficult for Bryan. She described herself as anxious around people she does not know, conscious of the invisible rules that seem to govern how a newcomer should stand, speak or enter a conversation. At Lucky Tree, she said, people met her with warmth before she had time to retreat into herself.

That welcome reaches into a longer struggle over her own voice.

Bryan grew up singing and performing in theater. Her father is also a musician, better known in South Sudan, where her family is from. Yet singing for most of her life did not mean trusting the sound that came out.

“I’ve always wanted to sing, but I never really liked my voice,” Bryan said.

She spent years listening to artists she admired and bending toward them, trying to borrow their sound and perhaps some of their certainty. More recently, she has begun moving the other way — back toward whatever is unmistakably hers.

“I realize individuality is really important,” Bryan said.

She writes her own songs and has produced the music she has released, though she is still reluctant to call herself a producer. At Lucky Tree, individuality is not something she has to discover in isolation. It is everywhere: in the rapper building a verse outside, the singer testing an original song inside, the musician stepping into another person’s work without swallowing it.

“It’s very positive here, and everyone very obviously supports each other, which is beautiful,” Bryan said.

Other creative spaces have carried what she calls “mean-girl energy.” Lucky Tree did not.

“It feels very beautiful. It feels warm,” she said. “It’s giving more of a kind of familial vibe.”

Bryan had been coming for days. Henderson, for months. Deneil, for years. Time had not flattened their experiences into the same story, but each had crossed the same small threshold: arriving without the community they wanted, then finding pieces of it crowded into one cafe.

For Henderson, the feeling becomes clearest after the formal performances begin to fall away. The people who came mainly to network start to leave. The room grows smaller. Individual acts dissolve into musicians playing together.

Then, she said, “it’s literally just the music.”

“It’s just the vibes,” Henderson said, “and it always reaches that second plane that music only can reach.”

Listening can appear passive only from a distance. Inside the cafe, the audience gives a performance its temperature. A cheer can loosen someone’s shoulders. A nod from the right stranger can carry an uncertain singer through the next line. Applause fills the brief, exposed silence after a final note.

Gomez returns because she wants to be part of that exchange.

“Everyone’s very nice and genuine and welcoming, too,” she said. “So it’s a awesome community. I enjoy it.”

At Lucky Tree, no one merely watches. Not really.

The jam makes that truth visible. Unlike the scheduled performances, it has no neat boundary around who prepared, who registered or who was supposed to be heard that night. A late arrival can enter. Musicians can join one another. Someone listening near the back can become part of the sound before deciding whether to call it a performance.

“There are not a lot of open mics where they’ll have a beginning jam and then a mid jam and then an end jam,” Deneil said.

The cyphers outside follow a similar law. One person begins, but the circle survives through response. A verse calls for another verse. The person waiting at the edge becomes the next voice in the center. What looks spontaneous still depends on trust: the belief that someone will catch the beat when it is passed.

Sometimes, Deneil said, his favorite moments are “when there’s just good shit back to back to back.”

He listens not only for the performances but for what rises around them.

“You hear the people support it and, you know, just rock with what they’re doing,” he said.

Ashley Faries, one of Lucky Tree’s owners, watches that support from the perspective of someone who helped create the room. She and her family were not musicians when they began making space for music. Lucky Tree already offered walls to visual artists. They wanted musicians to have an outlet of their own.

The idea for Live Mic did not arrive as one person’s grand invention, Faries said. It emerged through a family brainstorm about what kind of community event the space could hold.

“We knew that we wanted to create that outlet for musicians,” she said.

Live Mic began during the first week Lucky Tree opened in Raleigh. In those early nights, there was no dense crowd pressed beneath the artwork. Faries remembers only a handful of people gathered together, more living room than venue.

From there, she said, “it just grew organically.”

Now she gets to watch someone approach the microphone for the first time and become briefly unrecognizable, even to themselves.

“I love seeing people hit the mic for the first time and just kind of go out of themselves for a minute,” Faries said.

The transformation requires a certain softness in the room — enough permission for a person to loosen the grip they keep on themselves elsewhere.

“There’s a freedom in the vibe,” Faries said. “You are able to let your guard down and share part of yourself.”

Her instinct to make that kind of place did not begin with the cafe.

It began years earlier, in the woods, with a treehouse built from what other people had left behind.

The memory could have remained one of those childhood constructions that disappears as soon as the wood rots or a family moves. Instead, the idea beneath it stayed.

“It seems insignificant, but I can actually remember that moment of inspiration,” Faries said.

Homeschooled as a child, Faries said she knew by about age 12 that she wanted to create some kind of gathering place. By 16, she was drawing it. Years later, she and her sister stopped sketching and began with whatever they had.

“We really just started somewhere,” Faries said. “We just started with what we had back in 2012.”

Lucky Tree’s first form was not the Raleigh cafe it is now. The business began in Cary as a space for artisans and community events, where the family also hired musicians they knew. They wanted to add a cafe, but space and money were limited. Later, Lucky Tree moved to Raleigh and grew into the room Faries had been carrying in pieces since childhood.

The treehouse came with it.

Not literally, but in the instinct to rescue what looks used up and make it useful again. Faries calls the cafe’s aesthetic “treehouse décor.”

“I don’t know if that’s a thing, but we definitely created it,” she said.

The room is filled with found objects, recycled pieces and things that had been headed toward the dump. Like the childhood treehouse, Lucky Tree wears its construction openly. Its surfaces do not match. The art does not stay obediently at eye level. Instruments, bodies, lights and cables overlap.

“A lot of things that have stories, a lot of recycled things that were headed to the dump,” Faries said.

Those histories keep the room from feeling decorative in the sterile sense. The objects were something before they arrived there. Some still show it.

“It doesn’t feel flat,” Faries said. “It feels warm.”

Warmth, here, is not polish. It is evidence of use.

The same is true of Live Mic. It started the first week Lucky Tree opened in Raleigh, with a few people sitting together in what Faries remembers as a “living-room style” gathering. Then more people came. They brought instruments, original songs, friends, nerves, grief and unfinished versions of themselves.

“The whole business itself has been an organic process,” Faries said. “It’s almost like an art form that’s still growing and has layers.”

More than a decade after Lucky Tree began, Faries does not speak about it as though the work has reached completion.

“It’s not done by no means,” she said. “We’re still creating it. We’re still in it.”

That may be why the room can hold so many kinds of arrival. It does not ask people to enter something pristine and leave it untouched. A first-time singer changes it. So does an audience member who keeps returning, a rapper who starts a circle outside or a musician who slips into the jam after the list ends.

Like the treehouse, Lucky Tree was built by a family.
Then other people gave it a life.

For Henderson, it is the part of Live Mic she anticipates most. As the room thins, some of the evening’s ambition thins with it. The people who came to network have often gone. What remains is smaller, sweatier and less concerned with being seen.

“It’s literally just the music,” Henderson said. “It’s just the vibes.”

This is when she feels the room reach “that second plane that music only can reach.”

It is also when the boundary between audience and performer becomes hardest to defend. Someone who never made the list can sing. A musician can enter for a few measures and leave without having to claim the song. A listener can stand close enough to feel the bass move through the floor.

Nearly four years ago, that opening was waiting for Deneil.

His friends had canceled.
He had come alone.
The list was full.

Then the jam began.

He sang.

And he came back.

Now he stands at the microphone and makes room for someone else to do the same. It may be a singer who has followed Lucky Tree online for years, a musician searching for a way into Raleigh’s scene or a rapper carrying the rhythm in from the cypher outside. They do not have to know anyone yet. They do not even have to arrive on time.

The room was built to remain unfinished.

Outside, chalk still covers the pavement around the rusted drum kit. Voices gather beyond the cafe doors, trading verses after the formal performances have begun. Inside, artwork crowds the walls and watches from the ceiling. Cables cross the floor. Jackson’s seat is still a drum. The last name has been crossed from the list, but no one seems to mistake that for an ending.

Long after the list runs out, Lucky Tree is still making room. And someone is still playing.