Author: Michael Witthaus

The Music Roundup 22/04/14

Local music news & events

• Sense of place: An immersive experience, A Journey to the White Mountains in Words and Music is a collaboration between writer Howard Mansfield and composer Ben Cosgrove. A reflection of how 19th-century landscape painters helped expand awareness of New England’s wilderness, the content is based on a chapter from Mansfield’s Chasing Eden: A Book of Seekers, published in 2021, and driven by Cosgrove’s music. Thursday, April 14, 7:30 p.m., Bank of NH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord, $24 at ccanh.com.

• Throwback guy: Few acts dominated late 1960s Top 40 radio like Gary Puckett & the Union Gap, who reeled of a string of hits including “Lady Willpower” and “Young Girl,” the latter an early example of conscious songwriting — sort of. The group racked up six gold records and sold more vinyl in 1968 than any other act in the music business, including The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Friday, April 15, 7:30 p.m., Palace Theatre, 80 Hanover St., Manchester, tickets $39 to $49 at palacetheatre.org.

• Progressive rock: Digging into classics and deep tracks from Yes, Genesis, ELP, Rush and others, ProgJect includes veteran musicians like drummer Jonathan Mover (Alice Cooper, Marillion, GTR), Mike Keneally on guitar (Frank Zappa, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani), along with Saga singer Michael Sadler, Ryo Okumoto on keyboards (Spock’s Beard, Asia, Phil Collins) and Matt Dorsey playing bass (Sound Of Contact, Beth Hart). Friday, April 15, 8 p.m., Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry, $40 at tupelohall.com.

• Bring the funny: A comedy showcase is headlined by Johnny Pizzi, who also does magic tricks in his act. A native of East Boston, he brings a decided regional flavor to his standup, while offering observation of life as a parent and granddad, along with the challenges of aging. Pizzi is joined by Jason Merrill and Scott Higgins. Merrill is also promoting the show, dubbed Shooting From the Hip Comedy Night. Saturday, April 16, 8 p.m., Cello’s Farmhouse Italian, 143 Raymond Road, Candia, $30 at eventbrite.com.

• Well read: A live broadcast of local music spotlight radio show Granite State of Mind has singer, songwriter and band leader Hunter Stamas in conversation with host Rob Azevedo. Stamas also performs at the event, drawing from her group Hunter’s growing catalog. Their most recent release is 1960, which helped garner them a New England Music Award for best act in their home state at last year’s confab. Wednesday, April 20, 6 p.m., Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester, more at wmnhradio.org.

Brotherly love

Kevin and Michael Bacon perform in Plymouth

The Bacon Brothers are a prolific band — 11 studio albums since forming in the late ’90s, a live record and a hits collection — but there’s really not a Bacon Brothers sound. Kevin Bacon, who writes most of the band’s lyrics, attributes this to their being lifetime students at the College of Musical Knowledge.

“We’ ve lived long enough to have absorbed a lot of different … styles that have continued to grow through the years,” the actor and musician said in a recent joint interview with his brother Michael, a composer. When writing, he said, “We’re thinking about the way the song could sound, as opposed to thinking of a way to fit the song into the Bacon Brothers.”

Thus, there’s a world of difference between the Opry-ready “Picker” and “British Invasion,” which sounds plucked from a 1964 episode of Shindig. Both are from 2020’s The Way We Love, a record that is musically diverse but is also a concept record about love in its many forms.

“Our concept is usually do we have enough songs that we really like to make a 10- or 11-song record,” Michael said.

“Most bands have a certain kind of consistency, but it’s just not what we do,” Kevin added.

One of the best tracks on the new disc “Corona Song,” a tribute to their parents that’s both sweet and humorous; Kevin sings about missing them, while also being grateful they aren’t around to see the pandemic’s dumber moments.

“People get awards and they’ll say, ‘I know my dad’s up there watching, and he would be so happy for me’ — but there’s got to be other times,” he said. “Nobody ever says, ‘I’m so glad my dad’s not up there watching me as I get hauled off to jail.’”

After a handful of one-off gigs over the past two years, The Bacon Brothers are at last back on the road with a tour that stops at Plymouth’s Flying Monkey on April 14. The show will span their catalog and offer a few new selections.

“We have a really nice five-song EP coming out we’re really excited about,” Michael said. “Everything’s sort of falling into place again for us, which is a great feeling.”

One of their few appearances was Sept. 11, 2021, where they performed the moving remembrance song “Unhappy Birthday” in front of New York City’s Freedom Tower.

“Kevin and I both spent more of our lives in New York than out of New York, and that was a special experience,” Michael said. Kevin wrote it at the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks. “I think it’s the best 9/11 song, and it’s also eminently updatable. Because we’re always living with that.”

During lockdown, Kevin and wife Kyra Sedgwick had a novel way of maintaining harmony in their three-decade-plus marriage. They’d each retreat to separate areas of their Connecticut home, meeting around noon and again at day’s end.

“It’s a very high-class problem when you have enough rooms in your house that you can go off and be in your own space, come back together for lunch and then say goodbye until cocktail hour,” Kevin said.

Michael stays busy with his film scoring business, and he continues to provide the music for Henry Louis Gates’ series Finding Your Roots, which he’s done for 15 years — including a 2012 episode where his brother and wife learned they were distant cousins.

“It’s a dream job, I’m very lucky to have it,” he said. “It’s an incredible show.”

On the segment where Kevin and Kyra discovered their genealogical connection, the two also learned about a history of abolitionism in their family — along with an opposing fact.

“They also found out that we had a slave owner, and what was shocking to me is he was a Quaker,” Kevin said. “We’d always thought of the Quakers as leaning towards abolition [and] an understanding of the horror of slavery.”

Kevin’s busy acting career continues apace.

“I just finished up Season 3 of City on a Hill, which is on Showtime,” he said. “I think we’re going to be on in June, although I’m not exactly sure of the date. I did a film with Kyra in Rhode Island [Space Oddity] that’s hopefully coming out soon. It has a nice New England angle.”

The Bacon Brothers
When: Thursday, April 14, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Flying Monkey Movie House & Performance Center, 39 S. Main St., Plymouth
Tickets: $65 and $69 at flyingmonkeynh.com

Featured photo: Michael and Kevin Bacon. Photo credit Charles Chessler.

The Music Roundup 22/04/07

Local music news & events

• Heartfelt: Fresh from winning a Grammy for the 2021 collection, Bela Fleck brings his My Bluegrass Heart album to the Capital City. The banjo master was joined by a who’s who of roots music on the effort, including mandolinists Sam Bush, Sierra Hull and Chris Thile; fiddlers Michael Cleveland and Stuart Duncan, fellow genre-hopper Edgar Meyer on bass, and guitarists Bryan Sutton and Molly Tuttle. Thursday, April 7, 7:30 p.m., Capitol Center for the Arts, 44 S. Main St., Concord, tickets $39 to $69 at ccanh.com.

• Funkytown: Parliament-Funkadelic offshoot Danny Bedrosian & Secret Army plays a downtown Manchester show, with support from Jabbawaukee and Married Iguana. Bedrosian led the massive Super Motha Child as a teenager before joining P-Funk. Secret Army is a three-piece, focused on tighter grooves, “getting a lot of sound out of just a few people,” the Lawrence, Mass., native once explained. Friday, April 8, 8 p.m., Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester, $15 at the door and the show is 21+.

• Brew-to-do: A Nashua nano-brewery celebrates its sixth anniversary with an afternoon of music featuring local favorite Charlie Chronopoulos, preceded by a set from Dan Carter. Chronopoulos released the stark Chesty Rollins’ Dead End a couple of years ago. A “Northern rock and soul” record that observed the daily life struggles he sees in his home state, it was also a reflection of his choice to pursue an artist’s life there. Saturday, April 9, 1 p.m., Millyard Brewery, 25 E. Otterson St., Nashua, millyardbrewery.com.

• Momentous: Covid-delayed since late January, Mindset X finally marks 18 years as a band and an upcoming album at a hometown show. The new record’s first single, “For The Love Of War,” dropped earlier this year, the product of the prog-rockers’ first studio sessions with new guitarist Lucian Davidson. It’s a hefty, toothsome number that recalls early Black Sabbath and proto Metallica. Saturday, April 9, 8 p.m., Angel City Music Hall, 179 Elm St., Manchester, $10 at the door, 21+, more at angelcitymusichall.com.

• Tale teller: Though his songs are a joy, a big part of a Todd Snider show is his raconteur side. In the autobiography I Never Met A Story I Didn’t Like, he remarks on the ease of playing country songs. “You just strum around the ‘Johnny B. Goode’ chords until you get to the part where everybody stops and the singer yells the chorus, which is usually a slogan of some kind, like ‘ain’t goin’ down ’til the sun comes up.’” Wednesday, April 13, 7 p.m., The Music Hall, 28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth, $30 and $32 at themusichall.org.

Self-tribute

Heart By Heart hits Cap Center

Among tribute bands, Heart by Heart is unique in actually having original members in its lineup. Bassist Steve Fossen joined Heart when it was a Pacific Northwest club band banging out Zeppelin and Deep Purple covers. Drummer Mike Derosier played on a pair of tracks from their 1976 debut album, Dreamboat Annie, then joined full-time.

Compare that to what’s these days officially advertised as Foreigner — only guitarist Mick Jones was part of its best-known hits, and he tours with them for maybe half the year.

With singer Somar Macek and guitarist Lizzy Daymont performing the roles of Ann and Nancy Wilson, Heart by Heart is a facsimile, but one with real cachet.

“We have to call ourselves a tribute act, because people understand what that means,” Fossen said in a recent phone interview. “At the same time, Mike and I helped write the material, and we toured with it. … Actually, we’re kind of a tribute to ourselves.”

With the rhythm section at the core of hits like “Little Queen,” “Straight On” and “Barracuda,” Heart by Heart provides a faithful version of what Heart sounded like in its heyday. Though Fossen no longer dons a unitard as he did in his twenties and Derosier keeps his shirt on, the overall vibe is solid throwback.

“We try to recreate what it would be like to see a band in the late ’70s and early ’80s,” Fossen said. “The guitar players were out there doing double leads together, harmony solos, there’s keyboards blaring, drums and bass are loud. … That’s our goal.”

Fossen and Derosier were pushed out of Heart together in 1982, after the Private Audition album failed to sell as hoped. In the decades that followed, Fossen mostly stayed away from music.

“I was more into mountaineering,” he said. “I spent a lot of my time going up and down mountains, and driving all around Washington state to different wilderness areas.”

In 2008, Derosier and fellow Heart alum Roger Fisher invited him to play a few Heart songs with Macek at a Seattle party. It was the first night he met the woman who’d become both a music and life partner. His first impression was off, though, because he assumed she spelled her first name like the season.

“I thought, oh, here we go; she’s going to come in with the tie-dye dress, hairy armpits, smelling of patchouli oil, a classic hippie chick,” he said, noting that while there’s nothing wrong with any of those things, he was totally off base. “She spells her name S-o-m-a-r, she’s highly educated, and she’s been singing her whole life.”

Macek and Fossen bumped into each other a few more times and became friends.

“She had a band at the time, so I would go out and see her play,” he said. “They would invite me to sit in on Heart songs; the friendship turned into a romance by Christmas.”

He laughed at the observation that unlike Heart, whose romantic entanglements could rival those of Fleetwood Mac and then some, they fell in love before starting a band.

The two began playing as a duo at social gatherings, creating enough of a buzz that they were invited to open for Dwight Yoakam in Anchorage, Alaska. They decided a bigger sound was needed and brought on Derosier and guitarist Randy Hansen. The Yoakam gig ended up getting canceled, but the group enjoyed rehearsing enough to carry on anyway.

Their first official show was a breast cancer awareness benefit. When Daymont joined two years later, the doppelgänger effect was complete with her solid guitar skills and vocal support.

Their sets span all of Heart’s catalog, even songs Fossen and Derosier weren’t on, like “Alone,” “These Dreams” and “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You.”

“We look at Heart songs that are popular, that people want to hear, and we tried to learn those in the beginning,” Fossen said. “Obviously, with a band like ours, we want to please as many people as possible. There’s a lot of fans of that era of music, so we [play] those too.”

Heart By Heart
When: Saturday, April 2, 8 p.m.
Where: Capitol Center for the Arts, 44 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $25 and up ccanh.com

Featured photo: Heart by Heart. Photo by Bill Bungard.

The Music Roundup 22/03/31

Local music news & events

• Pickers’ pick: A new band of bluegrass aces, Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway is led by the award-winning guitarist and songwriter; the quintet encored a recent Seattle show with twanged-up take on Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Also on the bill is Bella White, a 20-year-old singer and multi-instrumentalist whose debut album Just Like Leaving was called “sublime Appalachian heartbreak” by Rolling Stone. Thursday, March 31, 7 p.m., 3S Artspace, 319 Vaughan St., Portsmouth, $22 to $25 at eventbrite.com.

• Jazzy folk: The four-piece band River Sister came together after an open mic revealed the preternatural connection of singers Elissa Margolin and Stefanie Guzikowski. They melded so well that they formed almost by acclamation. Rounded out by upright bassist Nate Therrien and drummer PJ Donahue, their music is a wonderful blend of folk traditions and jazz rhythms, pure harmony wed to musical complexity. Friday, April 1, 8 p.m., Bank of NH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord, $15 at ccanh.com.

• Blues man: Though he often sounds like he was plucked from a century ago, Guy Davis didn’t grow up in hardscrabble times. The singer, guitarist and actor has said he learned the blues tradition at first as a Vermont college student. He has a solid knack for channeling masters like Howlin’ Wolf and Blind Willie McTell, however. Saturday, April 2, 8 p.m., Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester, $25 at palacetheatre.org.

• Sound machine: A rare live appearance from prog rock duo Delusive Relics is part of an event dubbed Synthwave Night that will feature selections from their second album, The Blind Owl. The show also stars Bosey Joe, the electronic groove pairing of looping wizard Aaron Jones and sax player Curtis Arnett, who will headline their own showcase in downtown Concord at Bank of NH Stage in early June. Saturday, April 2, 8 p.m., Area 23, 254 N. State St., Unit H (Smokestack Center), Concord. See delusiverelics.com.

• Lunar tunes: In a new video filmed in an open field, percussive guitarist Senie Hunt covers George Ezra’s “Budapest” and makes it his own, with elegant, quick fills and hypnotic rhythm. Hunt is back home from his current Nashville base to play shows, including one at a colonial-era estate owned by Moonlight Meadery, who also makes beer and cider; it often hosts area musicians — see the schedule on their website. Sunday, April 3, 2 p.m., Over The Moon Farmstead, 1253 Upper City Road, Pittsfield, overthemoonfarmstead.com.

The Music Roundup 22/03/24

Local music news & events

• Request filler: An audience-driven event with a big screen catalog of over 200 songs, Max Weinberg’s Jukebox is the definition of a crowd-pleasing show. The E Street Band drummer and ex-Conan bandleader helms a quartet that readily knocks out requests ranging from the Beatles to the Stones to, naturally, plenty of the Boss’s favorites. Each show is different, but every one of them is a delight. Thursday, March 24, 7:30 p.m., Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester, tickets $49 to $115 (meet & greet) at palacetheatre.org.

• Still one: Formed in 1972, Orleans began inspired by an eclectic mix of styles including Meters and Neville Brothers styles roots music — hence the name — but the group found success with pop rock staples like “Dance With Me” and “Still The One.” They’ve endured some bumps along the way, including one member taking four years off to serve in Congress, and the death of key member Larry Hoppen, but they’re still playing. Thursday, March 24, 7:30 p.m., Dana Center, 100 Saint Anselm Dr., Manchester, $45 at anselm.edu.

• Bright beats: Enjoy an evening of dance music, luminescence and craft beer at the Pipe Dream Glow Party. Unleash the child within with glow sticks and face painting, as the W.A.P. DJ Trio entertains. The group consists of DJ ACHE, MC Mikey P&W and Wounded Wing. It’s the first time the veteran-owned brewery has done such a bash, with blacklights, pulsing rhythms and the energy of a big city discotheque. Friday, March. 25, 6 p.m., Pipe Dream Brewing, 49 Harvey Road, Londonderry, pipedreambrewingnh.com.

• Special night: Comedy fans looking to be a part of history should check out Juston McKinney in his upcoming show. Known for riffing on fatherhood and the foibles of New England, McKinney will be filming a new comedy special called On The Bright Side, his first since 2018’s Parentally Challenged, which was taped in Manchester. He’s done them for Comedy Central, Netflix and Amazon Prime. Saturday, March 26, 8 p.m., Capitol Center for the Arts, 44 S. Main St., Concord, $29.50 at ccanh.com.

• Party on: What once was a day’s celebration grew to a week and then a month — why not more? After Manchester’s end-of-March St. Patrick’s Parade, head across town for a post-event party, with Solitary Man performing traditional Irish music, joined by step dancers from Murray Studio, and more merriment from the AOH Hibernians Pipe and Drum Band. All proceeds from the bash benefit the Post’s baseball program. Sunday, March 27, noon, Henry Sweeney Post No. 2, 251 Maple St., Manchester, sweeneypost.org.

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