Linda Perry was supposed to be on stage at the Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts this past Saturday night, opening for the Indigo Girls. Instead, the 61-year-old singer and former 4 Non Blondes frontwoman ended up sitting in front of a Dr. Seuss shelf at a downtown Raleigh bookstore, strumming an acoustic guitar and leading more than 100 strangers through a singalong of her own 1993 anthem, “What's Up?”
The surprise pop-up happened at The Newsagent's, a small shop at 228 Fayetteville Street, after the Indigo Girls' Saturday show was postponed when band member Emily Saliers came down with the flu, according to a Facebook post from the Indigo Girls. That left Perry, who had been touring North Carolina with the folk duo as their opening act, with an unplanned free evening in a city she wasn't expecting to have time to explore. As the News & Observer reports, Perry wandered into the shop, started browsing, and asked if she could arrange a quick pop-up show on the spot.
Neetzan Zimmerman, who co-owns The Newsagent's, told the paper the whole thing was impromptu — there was no advance planning, no soundcheck, just a touring musician who happened to be killing time downtown. Word spread fast enough that fans raced to Fayetteville Street to catch it, including Tricia Andrews, who drove in from North Raleigh, met Perry in person, and walked away with a photo and an autographed flier. By the time Perry settled in, the crowd had swelled past 100 people packed between the bookshelves.
A Bookstore Built For Logging Off, Not Going Viral
The irony of a spontaneous, word-of-mouth gathering breaking out at The Newsagent's is hard to miss. The shop soft-opened in February 2026 as an intentional “analog media” store and coffee bar that skips public Wi-Fi on purpose, stocking paperbacks, vinyl records, VHS tapes, vintage magazines, and comic books for customers encouraged to unplug, according to Midtown Magazine. Zimmerman's own backstory makes the setting even more pointed: before opening the shop with his wife and co-owner Yulia Shamis, he built a career as one of the internet's most prolific traffic drivers, reportedly generating more than 17 million monthly page views as Gawker's viral editor in late 2013 and later holding senior digital roles at The Hill and The Messenger, per INDY Week's reporting on his career shift.
The building itself adds another layer of local history to the moment. The Newsagent's occupies the 1876 Mahler Building, a Raleigh Historic Landmark added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2000 and one of the oldest surviving commercial structures on Fayetteville Street, the same Midtown Magazine report notes. Decades before it stocked comic books, the building housed a dime store lunch counter that hosted Civil Rights sit-in demonstrations in 1960. Fayetteville Street itself runs as downtown Raleigh's main commercial corridor, linking the North Carolina State Capitol to the Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts and regularly hosting the kind of civic festivals and gatherings the corridor is known for.
A Grammy-Caliber Guest With Deep North Carolina Ties This Fall
Perry's Raleigh stop wasn't a one-off detour — it was part of a joint fall tour with the Indigo Girls that included scheduled North Carolina dates in Charlotte, Wilmington, and Raleigh running through October and November, according to Ticketmaster listings for the tour. Perry was scheduled to open for the Indigo Girls on the tour, and the Raleigh bookstore set gave fans an acoustic performance in a more intimate setting.
Perry's songwriting resume explains why a crowd formed so fast once word got out. She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2015 for writing “What's Up?” along with multi-platinum hits for other artists, including Christina Aguilera's “Beautiful” and Pink's “Get the Party Started,” according to her Songwriters Hall of Fame profile. “What's Up?” has had its own second life in recent years, including a 2023 duet recording with Dolly Parton on Parton's “Rockstar” album that introduced the song to another generation of listeners.
An Independent Shop Downtown
The Newsagent's arrival adds an independent bookstore and media shop to Raleigh's retail scene. The shop occupies a spot on Fayetteville Street, downtown Raleigh's main commercial corridor.
For now, fans who missed the Saturday pop-up will get another shot at seeing Perry and the Indigo Girls together when the rescheduled Martin Marietta Center show takes place on November 5. But for the hundred-plus people crowded around the Dr. Seuss shelf this weekend, singing along to a Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee in a shop built around logging off, the postponed concert turned into the more memorable show.
