Preacher & Daisy, based in Cambridge, MA, is the solo project of Sam Bailey. Raised in rural PA, Bailey’s influences include Lucinda Williams and Little Wings. Preacher & Daisy’s first self-titled release came out in 2017. Subsequently, Preacher & Daisy released the EP, Over Lake Erie, in 2019. This EP was recorded with Eva Hilton (bass), Maddy Baltor (lead guitar), and Cody Edgerly (drums). Returning to a solo act in 2024, Preacher & Daisy released its second full length album, All Your Many Eyes. Recorded in Durham, NC, All Your Many Eyes was produced by Riley Calcagno of the Americana duo group, Viv & Riley.
Artist Category: Singer/Songwriter
Sub Rosa Songwriting Retreat
Billy Keane
Billy Keane is a wanderer, a taker of the scenic route. From college dropout to world traveler to touring musician, Billy’s path is a winding one, and one which he has seen and experienced through the eyes of a singer/songwriter of a unique kind. In early 2020, Billy refound his sobriety from alcohol, ending a long lasting and destructive battle with himself, and beginning a new life of clarity, gratitude, and a deep and abiding appreciation for and love of simple living.
Gaining notoriety as the co-founder of the berkshire based collaborative The Whiskey Treaty Roadshow, Billy Keane’s sound is a blending of neo folk/americana with psychedelic indie rock and country. It is inspired by his life, listening and his belief that to be human means to experience the universe and our world, its people and to reflect all that back upon itself through artistic expression. He can be found performing his resounding anthemic songs either as a solo act with an acoustic guitar, or with his band, The Waking Dream
Keane’s debut album, Too Much to Let it Go released in August 2022, has garnered over 200,000 streams, radio play across AAA radio nationally and critical acclaim across No Depression, The Boot and Americana Highways.
Billy’s musical legacy has taken him to festivals all over the country and he has had the honor of sharing the stage with household names like James Taylor, Yo Yo Ma, The Gin Blossoms and Blues Traveler and headlining folk clubs such as Cambridge’s Club Passim, Saratoga Springs Caffe Lena, NYC’s Rockwood Music Hall and San Francisco’s Hotel Utah.
Dylan Patrick Ward
A singer-songwriter from Vermont’s dirty south, Dylan Patrick Ward writes darkly comical, highly specific and nicely melodic songs about outsiders, oddballs, aliens, snowmen and love. Though his subject matter can be bleak, beneath the surface is a beating heart of empathy and hope.
David Wilcox
More than three decades into his career, singer/songwriter David Wilcox continues to push himself, just as he always has. Wilcox, by so many measures, is a quintessential folk singer, telling stories full of heart, humor, and hope, substance, searching, and style. His innate sense of adventure and authenticity is why critics and colleagues, alike, have always praised not just his artistry, but his humanity, as well.
That’s not by accident; it’s very much by design. It’s the result of a man giving himself over in gratitude and service to something bigger than himself. “I’m grateful to music,” he says. “I have a life that feels deeply good, but when I started playing music, nothing in my life felt that good. I started to write songs because I wanted to find a way to make my life feel as good as I felt when I heard a great song. I don’t think I’d be alive now if it had not been for music.”
An early ’80s move to Warren Wilson College in North Carolina set his wheels in motion, as he started playing guitar and writing songs, processing his own inner workings and accessing his own inner wisdom. In 1987, within a couple of years of graduating, Wilcox had released his first independent album, The Nightshift Watchman. A year later, he won the prestigious Kerrville Folk Festival New Folk Award and, in 1989, he signed with A&M Records, selling more than 100,000 copies of his A&M debut, How Did You Find Me Here.
In the 30 years and more than 20 records since — whether with a major label, an indie company, or his own imprint — Wilcox has continued to hone his craft, pairing thoughtful insights with his warm baritone, open tunings, and deft technique. He’s also kept up a brisk and thorough tour itinerary, performing 80 to 100 shows a year throughout the U.S., and regularly deploying his talents by improvising a “Musical Medicine” song for an audience member in need. In recent years he’s taken that process a step further, carefully writing and recording dozens of his “Custom Songs” for long-time fans who seek his help in commemorating and explaining the key milestones in their lives.
Lest anyone think that he’s lost his touch, Wilcox pulled no punches on his most recent release, 2018’s The View From the Edge. Not only does the song cycle find him delving into mental health, family legacies, spiritual contemplations, and topical concerns, the song “We Make the Way By Walking” also won him the Grand Prize in the 2018 USA Songwriting Contest.
“I think the coolest thing about this kind of music is that, if you listen to a night’s worth of music, you should know that person,” he explains. “If you’re hearing a performer sing all these songs, you should know not only where he gets his joy and what he loves, but you should know what pisses him off and what frightens him and what runs him off the rails, what takes him apart and what puts him back together.”
To attain that level of revelatory honesty, Wilcox follows a song to its deepest truth, even when it haunts him, a practice which demands the strength of vulnerability that he has sought since his teen years. That honesty is why Rolling Stone has written that his “ongoing musical journey is compelling and richly deserving of a listen.” It’s also why Blue Ridge Public Radio has noted that, “The connection people feel with David’s music is also the connection they feel with each other.”
But Wilcox’s unique brand of storytelling doesn’t come easily. And it doesn’t come quickly. “I could always think of a lot of possible ways the song could go, but the trick was recognizing truth amidst all the cleverness,” he confesses. “The more time I took, the more my deep heart could speak to me through the process of songwriting. I could gradually craft a song that felt like it was coming from the place I was going. If you decide to trust heart over cleverness, you not only get a song that moves you, you get a song that moves you toward being who you want to be. The time you spend immersed in the emotion of a song changes you. The song shows you the world through a particular point of view. Once you have seen the world that way, you can’t un-see it.”
Kyle Morgan
Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Kyle Morgan grew up in central Pennsylvania, where he spent countless Sunday mornings amidst the broken strains and coffee breath of his church congregation. His first record, Starcrossed Losers, became the alias under which he would go on to release two more, Bind Us Anew and Strange Hesitations, each featuring his distinctive conglomeration of Americana styles, from stripped-down acoustic ballads and love-lorn parlor laments to roaring alt-country and throwback 60’s rock’n’roll.
Released just this past February on Team Love Records, Younger At Most Everything, is a collection of deeply personal songs that reads like a map of Morgan’s spiritual evolution. From child of evangelical Christianity to existentially paralyzed adolescent, drunken romantic to neurotic but industrious artist, Younger takes listeners on a bumpy journey through the badlands of self-doubt, fear, repression, and near-despair, charting the ongoing, non-linear path towards healing.
Marc Douglas Berardo
Singer-songwriter, performer and keen observer, Marc Douglas Berardo’s songs are sharply drawn and cast a net on unusual and beguiling characters and places that bring to mind James Taylor, Jimmy Buffett, Guy Clark, and Steely Dan with a touch of Mark Twain or Hunter S. Thompson. His songs have been recognized at many prestigious national festivals and events such as The South Florida Folk Festival, The Wildflower Art and Music Festival, and the legendary Kerrville Folk Festival. He has opened for or shared the stage with The Doobie Brothers, Little Feat, John Hiatt, Martin Sexton, Eric Taylor, Kevin Welch, Kim Richey, Will Kimbrough, and David Olney among others.
Berardo has performed at many renowned venues all over including, The Town Crier,(NY), Club Passim (MA) Narrows Center for The Arts (MA), In the Round at The Bluebird Cafe (TN), Freight and Salvage (CA), The Emelin Theater (NY), and Caffe Lena (NY), Ramshead OnStage (MD), among others.
Berardo’s interview and live performance featured on the Sirius/ XM Satellite Radio show The Village was voted one of the best of the year by listeners. “Berardo takes you to a place within yourself to make changes you want to see in the world.” — Mary Jane Twohy, Sirius XM. No Depression Magazine called his last CD Whalebone: “sincere, fluid, charming and above all gripping.”
John-Allison Weiss
Known for their gritty, melodic indie pop songwriting, John-Allison Weiss emerged at the end of the 2000s as an early crowd-funding hero with a strong D.I.Y. ethos that has defined them throughout their career. After establishing themselves among the punk underground, they became a staple of the Warped Tour and released highly rated albums like 2013’s Say What You Mean and 2015’s New Love. Touring with everyone from Lou Reed to Letters to Cleo, Weiss has also collaborated as a songwriter with artists including Tegan Quin and Kevin Devine. Following a live album and 2021’s Death Valley Demos EP, they signed with Get Better Records and issued the singles “Different Now” and “Feels Like Hell” from their upcoming album ‘The Long Way’ out February 17th.
Dave Herlihy
Dave Herlihy is known most famously as the singer of O Positive, a band that dared to be dramatic, even when rocking out. It’s been awhile since he’s come up with new music, but his latest batch of songs, Postcards from Kindergarten Volume 1, doesn’t disappoint. It’s not quite O Positive redux, since the sound here is more stripped-down–but it’s still got the smarts, the intrigue and of course, the voice.
Postcards has its genesis in the isolation of the COVID 19 pandemic. Like everyone else, Dave was sequestered in his home for more than a year. He seized the opportunity to begin writing songs-more than forty of them.
In 2021, once vaccines became widely-available, Dave reached out to producer, composer and multi-instrumentalist Beth Burnett and he ventured to her studio in Bristol, Rhode Island. Over the next 18 months, Dave and Beth produced more than a dozen recordings. The music features Beth’s expansive production skills and Dave’s one-of-a-kind voice.
Dave says of their collaboration, “Beth and I had this understanding. Our studio sessions were going to be like hi-tech kindergarten—very spontaneous and immediate. We agreed to just get together, have fun, and make some musical postcards. We were striving for creativity with no corrections. No kindergartener ever goes back and fixes their finger paintings, they just paint one and move on to the next. So, Beth and I took a kindergartner approach in the studio, and we called the collection Postcards from Kindergarten.
The first single, “The Invisible Girl”–co-written by Herlihy, Burnett and guitarist Jeff Neuman–has all the earmarks of classic 80’s radio pop: shimmering production, guitar-hero sonics, and an unforgettable, melodic chorus. At the other end of the spectrum, “86 Years”, is a ripping alt-rock anthem that embodies the tension and release of the Pixies and Nirvana.
Postcards also features a handful of thoughtful acoustic numbers, including “It’s Alright” which may be the brightest gem of the batch. You could think of it as a pandemic song, or just one from any kind of rough patch: “It’s OK to not be OK’ is the lyric’s message. And while the song doesn’t give any easy answers, it does provide an uplifting cello riff at the end, just in time to offset Herlihy’s wail of desperation. It’s a sharp, cathartic moment from a guy who’s always specialized in them.
Wheelzie
WHEELZIE (the artist previously known as amelia chalfant) is who you’ve been waiting for. With honest songwriting, intricate yet captivating basslines, a gracious and moving stage presence, and the best shoes you’ve ever seen, WHEELZIE is guaranteed to make you feel everything.
