Artist Category: Folk | Page 10

Emily Haviland

Emily Haviland has been a part of the Greater Boston music scene for nearly ten years. As a graduate of Berklee College of Music with concentrations in fiddle performance and music therapy, she studied everything from music and how it can alter the brain all the way to American Roots and its rocky history.

With her debut album Not Who You Think set to be released in February of 2024, Emily Haviland continues to push boundaries in both her performing style and songwriting, and is not an act that you’ll want to miss. World-renowned fiddler, Darol Anger says “Emily Haviland is the Realest Deal in a long time. Real voice, real thoughts, real songs that say – with pungent power – what everyone’s really thinking. Glad to welcome her work into the world.” Emily Haviland has shared the stage with some of the great contemporaries like Aoife O’Donovan, Margo Price, Twisted Pine, Darol Anger, the late Emy Phelps, Bruce Molsky, and has been showcased on records released by Alisa Amador, Kaiti Jones, and others.

Chris O’Brien

Chris O’Brien began performing in the early 2000s in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area and quickly became a fixture in local music scene. During this period, Chris shared the stage with many of the country’s best emerging and established songwriters, including Antje Duvekot, Anais Mitchell, Rose Cousins, Ellis Paul, Vance Gilbert, Anne Heaton, Edie Carey, Meg Hutchinson, and many others.

In 2007, Chris released his first album, Lighthouse, which caught the eye (and ears) of the producers of NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion. In April 2007, Chris traveled with legendary guitarist Lyle Brewer and the iconic Charlie Rose to St. Paul, Minnesota to appear live on the show. Following the performance, Lighthouse skyrocketed to #5 on iTunes’ singer/songwriter charts. It was at that point that Chris began performing music full-time. Over the next three years Chris toured throughout the United States, performing at clubs, bars, festivals, colleges, fields, living rooms, porches, and parking lots.

In 2010, Chris released his second album, Little Red. While he continued to tour throughout 2010 and 2011, Chris returned to school in 2011 to pursue his degree. Although he never stopped playing, his touring and performances have been few and far between.

Chris’ love for writing and performing is as strong today as it was when he began in 2001, and he has been diligently working on a new collection of songs. He hopes to begin recording his third album, nearly fifteen years after the release of his first, in 2022. He is also committed to playing more live performances.

Zoe Levitt

Zoe Levitt is an Americana singer/songwriter and mandolinist currently splitting her time between Boston and Kathmandu. As a solo artist, she performs haunting originals, while as a mandolinist her recent collaborations include co-founding the Bluegrass & Nepali Folk fusion band Manaslu Blue and the all-female folk band Ama Yangri in Nepal. She currently performs in the US with the newly formed band Himalayan Highway, a collaboration continuing her efforts to bring together Nepali and American folk traditions. Zoe’s direct and powerful songs touch on everyday experiences and personal struggles; she uses as a platform to address social justice issues. With her haunting yet bittersweet voice, reminiscent of Natalie Merchant and Joni Mitchell, Zoe delivers lyrics of hope and resilience accompanied by gorgeous melodies.

Zoe grew up playing bluegrass with her father in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She graduated with a degree in geology from MIT and moved to Nepal to pursue music — her journey was recently profiled by MIT News. She has performed at venues across the US and Nepal including at Club Passim, Moksh, MIT, and Berklee. She has collaborated with many well-known Nepali bands including Kutumba and Kanta dAb dAb. As a social justice songwriter she has performed at Nirbhaya’s Women in Concert, the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center’s Walk for Change, and the MIT Monologues. When not performing, she can be found jamming with friends, hiking to look at rocks, or baking.

Long Gone John

A hard travellin’, folk singin’, blue feelin’, fingerpickin’, tall tale teller currently based in Portland Oregon. Inspired by aimless travels and the never-ending argument between the head and the heart; Long Gone John has found his voice in the humor of it’s troubles and recklessness of their beauty.

Once steeped heavily in the lush music scene of the Green Mountains; John was the creative force behind local favorite Tallgrass Getdown. Drawing from influences such as The Wood Brothers, The Devil Makes Three, Dr. John, Taj Mahal, The Band, Little Feat and many others, John wrote songs that were edgy, honest, soulful, and deep with a timeless element that somehow meshed seamlessly with carefully chosen covers and adaptations of traditional songs.

In 2015, he decided it was time to hit the road indefinitely. Trading rambunctious crowds at local dives, venues, and festivals for a fresh perspective on himself and his music. The long rambling prairies in the Midwest, the rocky mountains of the great divide, the deep borderlands of Arizona, and the unforgivingly beautiful pacific coast became his audience. After years of travelling, picking, contemplating, and working odd jobs all along the way he’s landed in the beautiful Pacific Northwest.

Sean Trischka Power Trio

Sean Trischka Power Trio is a brand new project led by New Jersey-born drummer/singer/songwriter Sean Trischka, featuring Charlie Muench (The Stray Birds) and Joseph Terrell (Mipso). Performing a mix of Sean’s original songs, a sprinkling of choice covers, and a healthy dose of improvisation, the Power Trio’s singular goal is to give their audiences a good time.

Playing a wide range of styles, from folk to pop to heavy metal, Sean tours nationally and internationally with many artists, including Carsie Blanton, Oh Pep!, The Stash Band, and Mipso. He has performed with a wide array of musicians including Oteil Burbridge (Dead & Company), Billy Strings, Mike Gordon (Phish), Sarah Jarosz, members of Lake Street Dive.

Sean has released two albums: The Shuffle (2015) and Of Course! (2018), both to critical acclaim. His upcoming EP, entitled Friendship, will be released in June 2022 with an accompanying video album.

Tim Eriksen

Tim Eriksen is acclaimed for transforming American tradition with his startling interpretations of old ballads, love songs, shape-note gospel and dance tunes from New England and Southern Appalachia. He combines hair-raising vocals with inventive accompaniment on banjo, fiddle, guitar and bajo sexto – a twelve string Mexican acoustic bass – creating a distinctive hardcore Americana sound that ranges from the bare bones of solo unaccompanied singing on Soul of the January Hills through the stripped-down voice and bajo sexto Christmas album Star in the East to the lush, multi-layered arrangements on Josh Billings Voyage, an album of northern roots American music from the imaginary village of Pumpkintown.

Eriksen’s own compositions, which NetRhythms UK described as “strange and original works,” have been featured in films like the Billy Bob Thornton vehicle Chrystal and the upcoming documentaryBehold the Earth. Eriksen’s other notable work has included extensive contributions to Anthony Minghella’s 2004 Oscar-winning film Cold Mountain as well as collaborations ranging from hardcore punk and Bosnian pop to symphony orchestra, duo work with Eliza Carthy and the 2010 Grammy-nominated album Across the Divide with Afro-Cuban world-jazz pianist Omar Sosa. In 2018 his song I Wish The Wars Were All Over was chosen by Joan Baez as her last recorded musical statement, and 2019 saw the release of a duet with Esma Redžepova, “the queen of Romani music and dance.”

The former frontman of the prophetic groups Cordelia’s Dad (folk-noise), Northampton Harmony (shape-note quartet) and Žabe i Babe (Bosnian folk and pop), Tim Eriksen is the only musician to have shared the stage with both Kurt Cobain and Doc Watson, and his media appearances have ranged from Prairie Home Companion to the Academy Awards. Having graduated from early shows at punk mecca CBGB, Tim’s performances have included his Carnegie Hall debut as a soloist in Even Chambers’ symphonic work “The Old Burying Ground” and two week-long stints at the Blue Note Jazz Club with Omar Sosa. In the studio, he has worked with legendary producers and engineers including Joe Boyd, T-Bone Burnett and Steve Albini.

While Eriksen’s curiosity and passion have led him on many musical journeys besides American roots, all his explorations are linked by the qualities of intensity, directness, and authority which combine in music that captures a truth about human experience and expresses it without apology.

Muhammad Seven & the Spring

Muhammad Seven & the Spring are a blue-collar Americana 5-pice from Boston, MA. M7 is a father, husband, activist and union garbageman who started writing songs at 14. The son of an Iranian immigrant father and French-Canadian mother, he and his music were born in the fallout of the ’79 Islamic Revolution and the Regan/Bush era, and draw influences from ’60’s protest music, ’70’s rock and roll, 80’s pop and ’90’s hip hop.

The Spring are a radical, talented, disciplined bunch of good-hearted artists. Together they make sweet sounds and outrageous proclamations.

Livingston Taylor

Livingston Taylor’s career as a professional musician has spanned over 50 years, encompassing performance, songwriting, and teaching. Described as “equal parts Mark Twain, college professor, and musical icon”, Livingston maintains a performance schedule of more than a hundred shows a year, delighting audiences with his charm and vast repertoire of his 22 albums and popular classics. In addition to his performance schedule, Livingston has been a full professor at Berklee College of Music for 30 years, passing on the extensive knowledge gained from his long career on the road to the next generation of musicians. Liv is an airplane-flying, motorcycle-riding, singing storyteller, delighting audiences with his charm for over 50 years.

Wallace Field

From the metaphorical ashes of a breakup to the literal ashes of a house fire, folk-rocker Wallace Field rises like a phoenix from the ashes with her debut album All Costs, out now. The album features nine original songs, took four years to make, and premiered on the fifth anniversary of the house fire. With her “powerful voice reminiscent of Joan Baez” (The Valley Advocate), Field stuns with her haunting, vulnerable songwriting and “crystalline voice” (The Recorder). The Boston Globe says “she always sounds like she means it.” Most of the album’s songs were written on baritone ukulele, always with the aim to transform them into a more powerful full-band sound.

No emotion is too sacred to explore for this late-blooming artist. Trained as a journalist in college, Field expertly unfolds her journey through heartbreak, house fire, and healing in All Costs. The Recorder writes that “Field emerges as a master storyteller who takes the listener on a journey through darkness to the light on the other side,” calling the album “a powerful, musically stunning debut about survival.” There are hints of Field’s influences in her range of voices, from the theatrical Kate Bush and Aldous Harding, to the folk roots of Joni Mitchell and Weyes Blood.

Field grew up in western Massachusetts. She’s performed in popular Massachusetts venues such as Cambridge’s Club Passim, The Parlor Room in Northampton, Holyoke’s Race Street Live (formerly Gateway City Arts), and Taffeta in Lowell. She’s opened for acts like Nellie McKay, Charlie Parr, Heather Maloney, and Elizabeth Moen. Field also took part in Signature Sounds’ 2023 Back Porch Fest and 2023 Arcadia Folk Festival.

Jake Xerxes Fussell

Singer, guitarist, and folk music interpreter Jake Xerxes Fussell has distinguished himself as one of his generation’s preeminent interpreters of traditional (and not so traditional) “folk” songs, a practice which he approaches with a refreshingly unfussy lack of nostalgia. By recontextualizing ancient vernacular songs and sources of the American South, he allows them to breathe and speak for themselves and for himself; he alternately inhabits them and allows them to inhabit him. In all his work, Fussell humanizes his material with his own curatorial and interpretive gifts, unmooring stories and melodies from their specific eras and origins and setting them adrift in our own waterways.

Fussell’s album Good and Green Again was released Jan 21, 2022 via Paradise of Bachelors. Produced by James Elkington, the record navigates fresh sonic and compositional landscapes and is, perhaps, his most conceptually focused to-date. Fussell and Elkington enlisted a group of formidable players hailing from Durham, North Carolina (where Fussell lives) and elsewhere, including regular bandmembers Casey Toll on upright bass, Libby Rodenbough on strings, and Nathan Golub on pedal steel. They were joined by welcome newcomers Joe Westerlund (Megafaun, Califone) on drums, Joseph Decosimo on fiddle, Anna Jacobson on brass, and Bonnie “Prince” Billy, who contributes additional vocals.

“…Fussell is the rare contemporary to approach folk in its pure form, shunning self-penned compositions about bummer relationships to concentrate on material handed down from bygone, hardened times.” – The New Yorker