Author: Michael Witthaus

Queens honors great women of song

For her one-woman show Queens, Jordan Quinn sets a high bar, channeling iconic singers from Ella Fitzgerald to Adele. Her impressive list also includes Aretha Franklin, Carole King, Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell, Janis Joplin, Dolly Parton, Lady Gaga, Donna Summer, Chaka Khan and Quinn’s personal favorite, Whitney Houston.

“I save Whitney as the last song of the night because she’s just the best vocalist ever, and her ear is phenomenal,” Quinn said in a recent phone interview. “Of all of those women, it’s always Whitney I relate to most musically.” In particular, she draws inspiration from the story of how Houston came to record “I Will Always Love You,” her biggest hit.

“The first time she heard that song, she rejected it, because it was a country version, Dolly Parton, right? Then her buddy came up to her and … encouraged her to listen to the song with her ears — what would she do with it? She listened again and then decided that she would do it.”

To Quinn, trailblazing is what makes a singer Queens-worthy.

“A woman who was able to influence those to come and who other artists strive to be like,” she said, which explains the inclusion of many contemporary artists. “Lady Gaga is important because she brought a lot of techno to the music. Adele because of all the soul and jazz elements; she kind of keeps that genre alive.”

Though she includes songs from the Queens lineup in her solo act, the show itself is new, first performed Sept. 16 in Dover. Quinn’s father suggested the idea a few years ago. “He presented it to me, and I was just way too shy to even attempt to do this,” she said. “Then I started working with some other tribute bands, and I started learning from them.”

Prominent among those groups is Queen Flash; she sang “Somebody to Love” with them on a few occasions. She opened for them at Blue Ocean Music Hall in Salisbury, Mass., earlier this year. “Freddie Mercury is my personal Queen,” Quinn said with a laugh.

For Queens’ debut in her hometown of Manchester on Friday, Oct. 13, the audience will be invited to take part, with a Halloween costume element.
“I think it would be super fun to have them come dressed up as their favorite queen,” Quinn said, noting that there will be a red carpet for participants to walk across prior to her performance.

Choosing which song to do was almost harder than picking singers, so she’s decided against locking one tune in for each.

“Now that we have the foundation down, the idea is, let’s learn a couple of songs from each artist,” she said. “Then, night of the show, let’s figure out which ones we want to do. That way, it’s not the same thing every time.”
She’s still looking at adding artists.

“It’s crazy,” she said. “I don’t have Britney on there and I don’t know why, but I need her. Christina Aguilera. There’s just so many. Taylor Swift, especially after her tour this year, she’s just totally popping off and I’m like, ‘Great, another woman!’ It’s gonna be a four-hour show.”

A theater kid growing up, Quinn shaped the evening into more than a concert. She had help from her dad, who isn’t a musician but has solid instincts. “It’s insane to me that he’s not in the business,” she said. “He comes up with the ideas and then I take on the theatrical side of it … like 10 to 15 costume changes, an apron and fake prop milkshakes for ‘She Works Hard for the Money.’ It’s a lot of fun.”

Quinn’s group for the show includes guitarist Ben Holiday, Moira Applebaum on keys, a rhythm section of drummer Scott Armstrong and bassist Matt Nemeskal, along with backing vocalists Genesis Toledo and Rebecca Turmel.

“Their talent is just phenomenal,” Quinn said. “I truly wouldn’t be here without them.”

Queens featuring Jordan Quinn
When: Friday, Oct. 13, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Rex Theatre, 21 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $29 at palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: Jordan Quinn. Courtesy photo.

Well-rounded comic Steve Hofstetter

Raised in New York City, with a father who watched Dick Gregory perform in Village comedy clubs in the early 1960s, Steve Hofstetter grew up to be a smart comic. Don’t interrupt his set; Hofstetter’s retorts draw blood before an offender even knows there’s a knife in the scene. He has a YouTube page dedicated to heckler management.

Professional comedy wasn’t his destiny — until love leapt up.
“I always enjoyed watching stand-up. I never thought I’d become one,” Hofstetter said by phone in July. “When I was 13 … the girl I had a crush on told me she thought I should join the improv club in school. I was so enamored with the idea that someone I was impressed by thought I was funny enough to do that.”

Over a 20-plu-year career, Hofstetter’s made eight albums and specials; the latest is The Recipe, which debuted on YouTube earlier this year. He has a knack for thought-provoking jokes, like one with a Rorschach test punchline, “I hope you get from life exactly what you deserve.” Broadly, he specializes in observational comedy, drawing inspiration from keeping his eyes open.

“Whenever people say, ‘Where do you get your material?’ I always think, ‘How come you don’t have yours?’ — we all live in the same world and see the same things,” he said. “It’s just about paying attention and processing what’s going on around you … if I see something that’s anachronistic, I can’t not notice it.”
Improv still plays a role in Hofstetter’s comedy, in the form of a Q&A session after every show. He began doing them 10 years ago, mainly to produce content without having to give away new material online.

“I was OK posting bits I wasn’t doing anymore, but I didn’t want to post any of the current stuff,” he said, and the segments resonated, “because, partially they were watching comedy happen on the fly, and isn’t it more interesting to see something getting painted than just see the finished product?”

The sessions became good-natured roasts when he began bringing in fellow comics, the first time after he learned that his dog was dying and would need to be put down at tour’s end. “I was in no shape to think on my feet,” so Hofstetter asked two friends to lend emotional support. “They said yes, and it was great. It was so much fun to be able to bounce back and forth off each other.”

Hofstetter’s work extends beyond comedy. He’s written books and, a tireless baseball nerd, has worked in sports radio as well as writing a column for Sports Illustrated. He runs the nonprofit Steel City AF, a live/work/play environment for comedians based in Pittsburgh, where he’s lived for the past few years.

“It was always a dream of mine to have some sort of comedy-based charity, and when my dad passed, I had this realization of, if you keep waiting for stuff, you might never get there, so I decided to start it,” he said. He moved to Pittsburgh from Los Angeles, finding it was an ideal home base city with a great civic spirit.
“The thing I like about it most is just how passionate about the city residents are; people are really, really proud of it, and want to make it better. There’s this amazing camaraderie that I just really like.” The foundation has given away some scholarships, and opened a performance space in a renovated building, inspired by an experience Hofstetter had at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Beyond that, Hofstetter received a Nobel Peace Prize nomination (really) for a digital comedy club launched during the pandemic. It led to over $1.5 million worth of work for comics that had no other options. “I was also still running my foundation where I was giving out grants to comedians that didn’t have any way to make any money,” he added.

What set the effort apart was that it extended beyond the constraints of livestreaming.

“We let the audience be unmuted, which was very different than most other places, because without an audience a comedian doesn’t have timing, and it feels awful,” he said. They also limited tickets and thus audience size to make the virtual events more manageable.

An upcoming show at Nashua’s Center for the Arts will be Hofstetter’s first ticketed event in the Granite State.

“I’ve done some college shows there early on in my career, and I did some bar shows here and there,” he said. “But that was when people had no idea who they were going to see; this is the first time since anyone has heard of me that I’ll be doing a show in New Hampshire.”

Steve Hofstetter
When: Saturday, Oct. 7, 8 p.m.
Where: Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua
Tickets: $29 and up at etix.com

Featured photo: Amythyst Kiah. Photo by Sandlin Gaither

Amythyst Kiah performs in Portsmouth

Those who only knew Amythyst Kiah from Our Native Daughters were a bit surprised by her Rounder Records debut, Wary+Strange. Sure, it contained some rustic elements, but mostly the 2021 record rocked.

The clearest example was her version of “Black Myself,” a song that won a Grammy for the all-women-of-color supergroup she’s formed with Allison Russell, Leyla McCalla and Rhiannon Giddens. Kiah’s re-recording growled with an electric urgency akin to Gary Clark Jr.’s 2019 scorcher “This Land,” and landed a country mile beyond the banjo-punctuated original.

Kiah decided to revisit “Black Myself” because it felt fuller when she wrote it.

“It was inspired by a line from the Sid Hemphill version of ‘John Henry,’ and that became the hook,” she said by phone recently. “I put the guitar part underneath and I was kind of like, ‘This feels like an anthem.’ It became part of the Our Native Daughters sound, but my music is in a lot of ways a modern take on roots music, so we explored bringing myself back in.”

It’s a side of Kiah that will be on display at her upcoming shows in Portsmouth, part of a tour that started on Sept. 27.

“I’m bringing a full band on this run, drums, bass and lead electric guitar,” she said. “Everybody sings background vocals on quite a few of the songs. It’s definitely a much bigger sound than what some people might know me for.”

Equally powerful is her raw honesty as a songwriter. “Wild Turkey” is a spare acoustic song from Wary+Strange that dealt with her mother’s suicide when she was 17. The experience led to her first public performance, at the funeral. Asked how she found a way to write about it now, her answer provided a clue to Kiah’s creative spark.

“Being a child of the ’90s, and getting into alternative music, I was really leaning into things that were on the darker side,” she said. “Dealing with feelings like anger and loss. Songwriters being willing to dig down in the depths and really talk about how they feel, that’s something that’s always resonated with me.”

It still does; her most recent EP, Pensive Pop, contains reimagined covers of Tori Amos, Green Day and Joy Division.

Still, “Wild Turkey” took Kiah years to write. “It was dealing with such a tragic event in my life that I never really properly processed, and it wasn’t until I started going to therapy that I realized there’s some unresolved grief here,” she said. “It took so long to write simply because it took a while to unpack all those feelings.”

She stretched the process by constantly tweaking with the song’s mood. “In the beginning, I was trying to make it … more upbeat, like I wanted to juxtapose the subject matter with the music,” she said. “Sometimes you just have to get out of the way and let the song be what it’s gonna be. That’s what I had to do, [because] it’s a really sad song.”

Many fans have thanked her for the “Wild Turkey,” telling Kiah that it helped them process their own grief. She’s heartened by the response.

“If there’s anything I can leave behind in this world, it’s art that people were able to turn to when they felt alone or like they didn’t have anybody,” she said.

“It’s really an honor to have the opportunity to share that with people. … it means a lot.”

Kiah will unveil new songs at her show, the products of some recent cowriting efforts. “Empire of Love,” written with Sean McConnell, is “about my spiritual connection to the mountains where I live, in Appalachia,” while a co-write with Butch Walker is a “straight ahead rock song” called “Never Alone.”

She also collaborated with Avi Kaplan and Jeremy Lutito, who both worked on Kaplan’s LP Floating on a Dream, which Kiah called “probably my favorite album of last year.” Their writing session was inspired by the Old Gods of Appalachia podcast, which led her to read more horror and fantasy stories. “I’m returning to sounds of Appalachian folk music, still with a modern take and it’ll sound a little weird, like all my music sounds.”

An album she hopes to finish by year’s end will reflect this latest direction.

“There’s going to be some spooky songs on there and then some autobiographical songs and more of what I usually write about, but with some other things thrown in,” she said. “That’s the new stuff coming down — a spooky Appalachian vibe, with some rock and blues influences. It’ll be fun; I’m excited about it.”

Amythyst Kiah
When: Wednesday, Oct. 4, at 6 and 8:30 p.m.
Where: The Music Hall Lounge, 131 Congress St., Portsmouth
Tickets: $30 and up at themusichall.org

Featured photo: Amythyst Kiah. Photo by Sandlin Gaither