David Champagne

• Americana
• Blues
• Singer/Songwriter

This concert will include artists from the original release plus special surprise guests, and will be a companion to the always popular Treat Her Right Dancers shows.

David Champagne just won’t go away. His slippery blues-punk guitar playing and unpredictable lyricism was conceived out of rolling loose leaf cigarettes with pages from Old Testament in the alley behind the Stillwater, Oklahoma U-Tote-M.

David Champagne is an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter. His most prominent band was Treat Her Right. He grew up in Kansas City, and after spending time in New York and California, he moved to Boston where he became a longtime fixture on the local music scene. Around the turn of the 1980s, he was in Shane Champagne, which Trouser Press described as being like Graham Parker’s band, the Rumour. This group issued several singles. Alcott was also in Pink Cadillac, “a sharp rockabilly-cum-rock’n’roll trio” that released one EP in 1983.

In Treat Her Right, Champagne’s “tremulous slide guitar” provided part of the band’s distinctive quality, as Nashville music journalist Robert K. Oermann put it. People magazine wrote that Champagne mimicked the moaning vocal-slide guitar interplay that Robert Plant and Jimmy Page did so well in the early days of Led Zeppelin. That article also noted how Champagne and Mark Sandman wrote “bona-fide bad luck songs with a wink.”

Whereas Sandman achieved greater fame with Morphine, Champagne was not in the limelight after Treat Her Right disbanded. Yet he continues to perform in the Boston area under his stage name. In recent years, his project has been called Agnostic Gospel. His wife Katie has been his partner in some of his musical endeavors.

Rose Polenzani

• Americana
• Folk
• Singer/Songwriter

Rose Polenzani was born in the midwest to a musical family, learning harmony at her parents’ knee, hiding out under the family piano; she was always surrounded by music.

She began writing songs in college, and left school to start her life as a singer-songwriter. She was discovered by Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls, signed to Ray’s Daemon Records for two releases, and spent a decade touring the US, supporting such acts as the Indigo Girls, Over the Rhine, Joan Baez, David Gray, and Freedy Johnston. Though she started as a solo act, collaboration has become the driving force behind her songwriting, as evidenced by her recent work in Wintery Songs in Eleventy Part Harmony, the Sub Rosa collective, and her lush, live-in-studio recordings “The Rabbit” (2011) and “When the River Meets the Sea” (2006).

Jennifer Kimball

• Folk
• Singer/Songwriter

Boston-based singer/songwriter and harmony aerialist, Jennifer Kimball is releasing Avocet, her first solo record in ten years. Kimball grew up in a musical family and began singing professionally in 1983 with college classmate, Jonatha Brooke. ‘Jonatha and Jennifer’ evolved into national touring act The Story and signed with Elektra, releasing two critically-acclaimed albums, Grace in Gravity (1991) and Angel in the House (1993).

Jennifer left The Story in 1994 to pursue a career as a freelance harmony singer and solo artist.  In 1998 she signed with PolyGram and released her first solo record Veering from the Wave about which The Washington Post wrote “what makes these songs [and their lush-quirky chamber-pop arrangements] so impressive… is the elegant melodies and harmonies, which capture the loneliness and longing that blossom in the wake of separation.”

In the early 2000s, Jennifer lost her mother, got married and had a son, hanging up her touring days in the process. Since then, her musical life has revolved around a vibrant local music scene in Cambridge/Somerville where she continues to share her compelling harmonies and melodic ideas with a slew of local projects, often collaborating with Rose Polenzani, Duke Levine, Rose Cousins, Laura Cortese, Kris Delmhorst, Session Americana, Alastair Moock, Peter Mulvey and Chandler Travis. She continues to write songs, teaches harmony singing, and runs a holiday ensemble called Wintery Songs in Eleventy Part Harmony.  Alec Spiegelman (Pokey Lafarge, Cuddle Magic) has produced an album that is surprising, poignant and beautiful, a splendid chamber-pop over and through which floats the unadorned and honest voice of a truly literate songwriter, a voice which conveys warmth without affect, the voice of Jennifer Kimball.

Dennis Brennan

• Americana
• Guitar
• Rock
• Singer/Songwriter

Dennis Brennan was born on the wrong side of the tracks in Marlboro, Massachusetts.

At age 9 he entered show business as Rumplestiltsken in a grammar school play. In 7th grade he performed “Louie Louie” with a local garage band at the Berlin, Ma. Town Hall and quickly evolved into “the lead singer”

That band evolved into “The Paranoids”, his musical outlet throughout his high school years. They opened shows for both The Remains and The Barbarians, garage band legends who are each featured on “Nuggets, original artyfacts from the first psychedelic era” Rhino R2 75486.

Following high school. Brennan’s education continued as lead singer in such well regarded outfits as “The Dirty Rye Band”, The West Side Band”, “The Martells”, and “Push Push”. These bands performed in every bar and dive on the east coast. An education indeed.

In 1992 he formed the Dennis Brennan Band and started his solo career, quickly releasing two critically acclaimed recordings on Upstart Records, a division of Rounder. In 2000 he released “Rule #1” on ESCA Records which resulted in glowing reviews from The New Yorker, The Chicago Sun Times, The Boston Phoenix as well as other publications nationwide. These recordings showcase Brennans ability “to not just tip toes into genres, he strips naked and plunges right in.” Bill Holmes, AMPLIFIER.