The Shakes emcee introduced herself as Ida, then introduced a clean-cut, graying guy as "Bruce, who will play songs about how every day should be payday." Bruce kicked off his set with a number he called "a happy pop song about an obscene phone caller." He closed his eyes with extra feeling during the chorus, which ran, "I say please/Please don't try to trace the call/I'm on my knees/I want your love on the line and that is all."

Bruce was followed by Zuryna, a petite woman with an enormously complicated cloud of black hair and a penchant for rhymes like "I touch your face with reckless danger/I feel like I've found a babe in a manger." Her songs, six-minute affairs composed of roughly three chords each, were the kind during which I would usually have been talking softly with my friends. But this time, the rapt, eerie silence of the audience kept me from doing so. Perhaps the unearthly quiet (I even felt awkward when I made noise stirring my coffee) was a result of the comment Bruce had made to the women sitting nearest him after his set, to the effect that their talking had "made it really hard to perform."

This insistence on silence, at least, was unconventional. For me, half of the point of a coffeehouse is to be able to enjoy well-stirred coffee along with live music and the company of friends (and to quietly snigger if a performer has left his or her fly unbuttoned).

But when the evening's headliners — a Swedish duo calling themselves "Crocodile Smile" — got onstage, a respectful, talent-show silence finally seemed appropriate. I had noticed the two unbelievably adorable teenagers, a wide-eyed boy and a sweet-faced girl with glasses, earlier in the evening, simply because they were so young that they looked like someone's visiting kid siblings. When they stood up, they looked so shy that I flashed back to the abject fear I had experienced during a long-ago, ill-advised middle school talent show performance of my favorite Jewel song.

Staring down at their feet and strumming the guitar with the intensity of fifth-graders at show-and-tell, the two ripped through five totally charming, unabashedly silly songs, the topics ranging from Mesopotamia to the tragedy of an unlovable lover with 11 fingers. The crowd laughed during all the funny parts and clapped enthusiastically, prompting the two to banter and announce after a song invoking James Dean and ice cream in the same sentence, "That was our deepest song!"

Afterward I went up to congratulate them and asked if they enjoyed playing for the audience. The girl, Amanda, pushed her glasses up her nose and said, "Well, sometimes I don't know which direction to look. But people here are so nice, and you all looked like you were listening!"