There are truly gifted people in this world, with a talent not only for art or music, but also for making people feel seen. Maddie Lam is the pinnacle of this gift.
As a child, Lam developed an interest in music, singing and taking piano lessons. After teaching herself guitar, she later began writing songs at age 14 as a way to cope with the world around her. The daughter of immigrant parents, she wants to pursue her music to the fullest extent, appreciative of the sacrifices it took to get her there.
When discussing her songwriting process, Lam states, “Some songs are like friends that you connect with immediately… other songs take months and years.” Her art is worth the time and effort it takes, including the creation of her music video for the song, “Violet Sky.” A process that she describes as laborious, but in an environment full of incredible artists, visionaries, and directors. As difficult as creating visual art, and songs can be, she says, “the role of the artist, for me, is about looking at the pain and not turning away… choosing to alchemize it.” Lam has experimented with visual art, focusing on self portraits. “I try to find the beauty in myself… to find a beauty that’s useful” she explains about her work with painting and photography.
Along with recorded music and accompanying visuals, Lam has stepped into the world of live performance. “It’s one of the most intimate things we can do with other people, to be in ceremony with other people… it’s quite ancient” she states. Live music is like capturing a firefly, Lam believes, and we get to show it to the people we hold close. Recently, she put together a band, taking on performances together. Their recent endeavor, a performance for the WGBH radio station, felt like an out of reach dream only a year ago for Lam. Her hard work and dedication amounts to deep connections and incredible music. Lam wants people to see “what happens when you dream out loud, when you dream with your feet and your hands and your heart.”
Named Penguin Eggs & Roots Music Canada’s New Discovery of the Year, Aleksi Campagne offers a contemporary, indie-folk take on the time-honoured fiddle-singing tradition. Born and raised in Montreal, Aleksi’s music blends folk songwriting with an edgy, multi-layered sound resulting from his unique combination of voice, violin and looping-effect pedals. His debut album For The Giving / Sans rien donner was just nominated for a Canadian Folk Music Award (April 2024), and is a fully bilingual album offering 10 songs in French and the same 10 songs in English.
Aleksi’s debut has been a whirlwind! Aleksi was selected as a Mariposa Folk Festival Emerging Artist to perform at the festival. His first single Another Day was picked by Paul Corby as a Top Single of 2022. He was then celebrated by Tom Coxworth as one of the Top 5 Favourite acts at the Folk Alliance International Conference, alongside acts like The Fretless and Mary Gautier. His second single Won’t be Scared was selected as the only Canadian finalist in the Kerrville Folk Festival’s Grassy Hill New Folk Competition for Emerging Songwriters. In a review in Le Devoir by Sylvain Cormier, Aleksi’s debut was compared to that of Patrick Watson and Half Moon Run. According to Roots Music Canada, “Aleksi Campagne finessed one of the most musically ambitious accomplishments of the year, an impeccable double album, one set of songs in two conjoined bilingual packages.” He is now touring his album with over 50 shows in Canada and the United States!
The Cradle is the musical project of Paco Cathcart. Born and raised in Brooklyn, and having cut their teeth at seminal DIY venues such as Palisades, The Glove, Silent Barn, etc, Cathcart has been a fixture in the New York underground for a decade or so. Often the lone “singer-songwriter” on bills with noise musicians, performance artists and clowns, Cathcart’s eclectic music reflects their locality in a thriving experimental arts scene, as well as their root interests in folk music, story-telling, history and poetry. Cathcart has something like 50 releases on cassette, vinyl, CD, and digitally, through many different indie labels, notably NNA Tapes, as well as self-releasing.
Miles Hewitt is a songwriter and poet residing in Brooklyn, NY. His debut record, Heartfall, drew critical raves, including from The Boston Globe, who named it one of the 50 Best Albums of 2022 and wrote: “A simply brilliant debut . . . by turns intimate and epic, lush with strings and delicate fingerpicked guitar, languid psychedelia and dreamy pedal-steel painted soundscapes.” Heresiarch proclaimed that “Hewitt is truly in league with the likes of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen” and named Heartfall their favorite album of 2022.
Alexa Rose was born in the Alleghany Highlands of western Virginia, raised in the tiny railroad town of Clifton Forge. Though no one in her immediate family played or sang, she inherited a deep musical legacy.
“Growing up I would hear stories of my great-grandfather Alvie who, for a time, lived and played with [bluegrass great] Lester Flatt when they were both young men,” says Rose. “Apparently, Lester tried to get him to move to Nashville and pursue a career. But my great-grandfather decided to stay in the mountains with his wife on their farm.”
That sense of place and storytelling spirit became woven into Rose’s voice and songwriting. In 2019, she released her debut album Medicine For Living, the title track of which won Merlefest’s revered Chris Austin Songwriting Contest. Her 2021 follow up Headwaters garnered national attention from American Songwriter and Rolling Stone, among others. Rose wrote most of the album in the early stages of the pandemic, which she astutely characterizes as having “that weird lucid feeling of not-time.”
“Headwaters are the source of a river. The furthest point from where water merges with something else. They are not mighty. Just a network of small tributaries, like a creek, not necessarily picturesque, but they’re the most important part of the river. Water is fluid and inconsistent and sacred and indifferent. You can be miles down a river, but you’re still at the origin. And in that way, water feels like it has transcended time. That’s how these songs found me—the same way memories do, in that slivering, elusive water. As quickly as you come across them, you bend in another direction.”
Perhaps following in the steps of her great grandfather, Rose’s songs feel like oil paint landscapes of her own life in the mountains, often wringing out the beauty in mundanity and exploring timeless topics. Her earnest, well crafted stylings are a multi-layered merger of old country music and traditional folk songs, colored by rock and roll and mountain soul.
Max García Conover is a songwriter from the burned over district of New York, now based in Maine. In the past he’s collaborated with Son Canciones, Haley Heynderickx, Ben Cosgrove, Paula Prieto, The Ballroom Thieves, and Julie Arsenault. In between songs he tells stories and those stories have been featured on The Moth Radio Hour and Stories From The Stage.
Indigo Ansin, known professionally as “chrysalis,” is a Boston-based singer-songwriter currently attending Berklee College of Music. Heavily influenced by artists they grew up listening to such as Joni Mitchell and Simon & Garfunkel as well as contemporaries like Field Medic, Indigo de Souza, and Adrianne Lenker, chrysalis fuses together a unique blend of indie pop and folk while occasionally adding elements of rock and soul to their sound. They strive to integrate their love for music with their passion for the liberation of oppressed peoples by writing about their life and making an effort to predominantly work with artists who are BIPOC and/or queer.
Despite having been writing music for two years, chrysalis has had major success in their career so far. In November of 2021, they opened for VÉRITÉ alongside Kat Cunning in Boston, where they had their first gig at Brighton Music Hall. They were then asked to open again for VÉRITÉ, getting moved up to the second opening spot and having their New York City debut in The Bowery Ballroom. Since then, chrysalis has been playing shows in Boston through the DIY house show scene as well as local bars and regularly busking at Faneuil Hall. chrysalis has also found success via Tiktok, accumulating over 80,000 followers and 2.2 million likes through their original music, covers of popular songs, and videos surrounding queer culture.
Justin Schaefers is a singer songwriter born and raised in Sonoma County California, with a modern blend of retro rock, lofi indie music, and folk. Justin studied songwriting at Berklee College of Music and is currently a working musician in Boston, Massachusetts.
Bandits on the Run is a musical trio comprised of Adrian Enscoe, Sydney Shepherd, and Regina Strayhorn. Formed upon a chance encounter while busking in the subways of New York City, the Brooklyn based outfit has gone on to receive accolades from NPR Music’s All Songs Considered, American Songwriter, NPR Weekend Edition, and the Johnny Mercer Songwriters Project. 2020 found them busy writing and recording their EP “Now Is The Time” with producer Ryan Hadlock (Brandi Carlile, The Lumineers) and producing a short musical film “Band At The End Of The World” commissioned by NYC based Prospect Theater Company. 2022 saw them they have composing music for the Netflix children’s animated series “Storybots”, scoring the movie “The Same Storm”, and touring the globe with appearances at the Cambridge Folk Festival, Floydfest, Milwaukee Summerfest, Americanafest, and the F1 Singapore Grand Prix. Their next release will be their most collaborative yet: a self-produced EP featuring various and sundry bandit friends that explores the tensions of a world that has been broken open but is putting itself back together; it is slated for release mid 2024.
Trinity Mei is an Indie Folk singer songwriter from Phoenix, Arizona, who has been captivating audiences with her relatable lyrics and her powerful yet angelic voice. At a young age, Trinity found not only a love for preforming but also a love for the process of writing and composing music. Taking inspiration from the works of Adele, Coldplay and Phoebe Bridges, Trinity’s uses metaphoric lyricism and honest storytelling to bring understanding to often complex emotions. Trinity is currently studying songwriting and production at Berklee College of Music in Boston and aims to write music that empowers and connects people through shared life experiences.
