Author: Michael Witthaus

Low Lily unveils Angels in the Wreckage

On their latest album, Low Lily, the rootsy trio of married couple Liz Simmons and Flynn Cohen and fiddler Natalie Padilla, decided to be bold. Angels in the Wreckage runs an expansive 14 tracks and is full of forthright songs. An a capella anthem, “What’ll You Do” is punchy, political, ready-made for a protest march; “One Wild World” covers similar territory more tenderly. Neither song, however, shies away from their core beliefs.

“We feel a little bit more comfortable being ourselves and speaking our mind and just kind of putting it all out there, because we’re not in our 20s anymore,” Simmons said in a recent interview. “Making a 14-track album would have felt almost gratuitous when we were younger, but at this point, we just don’t care; we had a lot to say.”

The album is their first with Padilla, as former fiddler Lissa Schneckenburger departed last year. “Travel was really too much for her at this stage in her life; it was an amicable parting,” Simmons explained. In fact, Schneckenburger contributed four songs to the new LP, one a co-write with Simmons, and plays on the opening track, a cover of Shawn Colvin’s “Round of Blues.”

“It feels like she’s still kind of present in the music, in that back of the curtain way,” Simmons concluded.

Cohen met Padilla at a fiddle camp, run by Brian Wicklund, where they’d both taught for several years. Initially he thought she’d be a good accompanist for his solo gigs. “She had a lot of the same taste in multiple styles,” Simmons said. Faced with a lineup change, they realized “someone like her, with all this versatility, would be the best fit.”

Padilla was living in Montana when she joined the band, but she recently relocated to Northampton, Mass., a short drive from Cohen and Simmons’s home in Brattleboro, Vermont. “We were ready to continue to fly her out for every tour, but she actually decided of her own volition to move,” Simmons said. “Now she’s a local.”

Born into a musical family, Padilla is also a singer, songwriter and guitarist. All three talents are on display in her lilting ballad “Captivate Me,” one of the album’s best tracks. An ode to her medicine man great-grandfather, it includes a gorgeous three-part harmony, and lovely acoustic interplay between her, Cohen and multi-instrumentalist/producer Dirk Powell.

Powell mastered their 2018 album 10,000 Days Like These and was the right choice to produce this time around.

“Especially because Natalie brings some of that old-time fiddle, and Dirk is so familiar with that particular style,” Simmons said, adding, “in terms of the American roots music, him being such a kind of legend in that world, it seemed like such a natural pairing.”

Throughout the project, they worked virtually with Powell, emailing tracks to him in Louisiana. “He would pick up what we were putting down,” Simmons said. He played banjo, double bass, electric guitar and, on the superb “Lonely,” piano, triangle and button accordion. “He brings a little of that Bayou flavor, that Cajun sound, which I think works so nicely on that track.”

There are two Cohen instrumentals on the record. “Keep the Pachysandra Flying” is a full group romp. He performs solo on “Bastard Plantagenet Blues,” a tribute to his time with English guitar master Davey Graham early in his playing days.

“Flynn went to school in England in Devon for three years and had the amazing opportunity to study with him, he also even had an all-day lesson with Burt Jansch” — a gift, as it turned out, Simmons said. “Burt was like, ‘Oh, you don’t owe me anything.’ Rolling with those guys, they were just so nice. None of them are alive anymore, so he enjoys little tributes when he can to those folks.”

The record ends as it began, with a cover — Jethro Tull’s “Wond’ring Again.” Simmons considers the song apocalyptic, a reflection of the album’s overall mood. “That’s kind of where that Angels in The Wreckage title comes from,” she said. “I’m struck by how beauty and destruction can live side by side.”

For a CD release tour that stops at Concord’s Bank of New Hampshire Stage on April 28, Low Lily will perform as a five-piece, with a rhythm section of double bass player Hazel Royer and Stefan Amidon on drums. They will perform the new LP from start to finish.

“We’re really excited to go on the road and represent the album sound live in this fuller way,” Simmons said.

Low Lily CD Release Show w/ Green Heron
When: Friday, April 28, 8 p.m.
Where: Bank of NH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $23.75 at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Low Lily. Courtesy photo.

John Craigie and Langhorne Slim co-bill in Concord

Every John Craigie concert has two sides. His songs are sweet, lingering earworms, with lyricism that’s soothing, provocative and often hilarious. The latter trait is the other part of experiencing Craigie; his comedy talent has earned him comparisons to Mitch Hedberg, even though he’s a storyteller and Hedberg was an absurdist with a skill for the one-liner.

Both share a beat poet delivery. Marry that jazzy cadence to Arlo Guthrie’s breeziness and perhaps feed it an edible, and you’ll have a sense of why fans love Craigie, and the reason other musicians tend to find ways to work with him, such as Jack Johnson, Mary Chapin Carpenter and, most recently, Langhorne Slim.

The two met at last year’s Newport Folk Festival. Craigie played two sets that weekend. The second was a last-minute addition when another artist canceled their appearance. Billed as John Craigie & Friends, it consisted of Beatles songs. He’d just recorded Let It Be Lonely, the latest in a series of live Fab Four cover records; Revolver will be next.

Slim joined him for “I Dig a Pony,” and the two were quickly smitten. “We had mutual friends,” Craigie said by phone recently. “I’d never met him before, but we started talking and he agreed to do that one song with me, and it was really fun.” A short tour, stopping in Concord April 24, resulted.

“I’m really excited to have our crowds mix together and kind of bounce off each other,” Craigie continued. “He’s got a great stage presence, as you probably know. At the end of the night, we’ll do a handful of stuff together for sure…. I think the audiences really like that, because you get something that really makes the show unique.”

Layered with electric texture, Craigie’s studio albums are the opposite of his live shows. For example, “Microdose,” which leads off 2022’s Mermaid Salt, ends with a jazzy dreamscape of multiple guitars. That’s not happening when Craigie hits the stage. On tour, it’s typically just him and his instrument, which suits him fine.

“You’re still very free, and you can talk just as long as the crowd will have you, but when there’s four or five people, kinda twiddling their thumbs behind you, I’m not quite as relaxed,” he said, adding, “my audiences have never said to me, like, ‘Where’s the band?’ It seems to me that what they want is what I’ve been giving them.”

Born in Southern California, Craigie found his musical voice while attending UC Santa Cruz, a few hundred miles north. “L.A. felt very particular and precious; I didn’t feel very free to sit and play my guitar casually,” he said. In the laid-back beach town, “music felt like a much more natural thing … to sort of practice to an audience of people that was very nice, forgiving and pleasant.”

There’s a lot of religious skepticism in Craigie’s lyrics. “It’s a war of the gods … I never picked a side,” he sings at one point. “Is this the Rapture or just the first wave?” is his refrain on “Laurie Rolled Me A J,” one of the best depictions of lockdown neurosis to come out of the pandemic.

Some of this can be attributed to his attending parochial school in a milieu where “there was no way for them to shield us from anything,” he said. “A vague Christianity was how I like to call the way that the Catholics raised me.”

The ’90s milieu offered a weird melting pot of belief and non-belief systems, Craigie continued.

“Kids at that time were going through this born-again thing, so I was meeting hardcore Christians, getting that sort of window … meeting Mormons, people like that,” he said, “All that coming together gave me an understanding, while the society I was in was also heavily rejecting Christianity. I think it was a combination of all that stuff.”

Langhorne Slim & John Craigie
When: Monday, April 24, 8 p.m.
Where: Bank of NH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $30.75 and $53.75 and up at ccanh.com

Featured photo: John Craigie. Photo by Keith Berson.

Nashua Center for the Arts welcomes Suzanne Vega

On her 2020 live album, An Evening of New York Songs and Stories, Suzanne Vega covers Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” and talks about how seeing him perform while she was in college changed her view of rock music. Vega was then a folkie, deep into Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. “To me, rock ’n’ roll was that thing that other people do,” she said in a recent phone interview.

Reed’s “blunt, graphic depictions” of New York life grabbed her. “I thought, wow, you can write about these things. When I first saw it, I found it repulsive; then I became fascinated. … I wanted to take it in so I could do it myself.”

On songs like “Tom’s Diner,” “Frank and Eva,” “New York is a Woman” and the poignant “Anniversary,” an ode to 9/11, Vega is a vital chronicler and erudite ambassador of her home city. On April 15 she’ll take the stage at the just-opened Nashua Center for the Arts, the second nationally touring act to play there. It’s also one of her first New Hampshire shows in a while.

The evening will also feature selections from Lover, Beloved, the film version of which premiered last year at South by Southwest. Written by Vega, the one-woman show began in 2011 as Carson McCullers Talks About Love. It’s a work in progress, she said. “In time, I’d love to see a transgender actor play her, especially in Act 1.”

Vega discovered the author of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Ballad of the Sad Café when a musical theater teacher assigned the task of dressing up and taking questions as someone in the arts who was no longer alive.

“I’d seen a photograph of Carson McCullers, and I thought to myself … I could probably play that woman, whoever she is,” she recalled. Then she read the Southern Gothic writer’s biography. “I loved her character, I loved the fact that she was this young woman in the 1940s with super-liberal politics and a precocious, freakish talent for writing. She was so fearless in her imagination; and I also loved that she drank and smoked like Hemingway.”

McCullers was also hopelessly drawn to the Big Apple, a topic Vega covers on “New York is My Destination” from Lover, Beloved. “New York is where I will be from,” she sings implacably. “New York is made for grander things / Just. Like. Me.”

Vega’s highest-charting hit is “Luka,” the second single from her 1987 album Solitude Standing. For years, she told anyone who asked that the story of an abused child came from her imagination, but 2021, Jay Lustig, a writer who was working on a series for The Museum of New York, approached her for an interview. Their initial conversation would lead to Vega declaring for the first time, “There was abuse in my family; I am actually Luka.”

She said Lustig approached his task as a historian, not a journalist. “He said, ‘I know your secret, and I know this because I watched the videos of your stepfather’s memorial, and I saw your sister’s speech. So I know that you’re an abused child.’ He just put it to me bluntly that way.”

Lustig offered her the choice of talking for publication with her abuse as the premise or walking away.

“I thought, OK, finally, I have someone who’s gonna force my hand,” she recalled. “There’s no point in saying my usual thing which is — I don’t lie, I say, ‘Yes, there was a boy, his name was Luka, he lived upstairs from me, he was not abused, but I’ve known children who were abused over the years.’ Since he’d presented it very thoughtfully and sensitively, I thought to myself, I don’t think I’ll ever get another chance like this to actually delve into it, and so that interview remains a very special moment in time.”

Surprisingly, response to her revelation was muted.

“I thought that this was a story that would go viral, everybody would be asking questions and carrying on. Almost nobody talks about it, it’s kind of stunning,” she said. “I did get letters from people who were abused as children, saying, ‘We already knew’” — though at most three people over the years had ever intimated they suspected.

“People close to me said, are you going to make a formal announcement? I thought, there’s no reason,” she continued. “I mean, that is the formal announcement. It’s not up to me to push it along, it’s there. If people want to talk about it, I’m into it. If they want to talk about other things, that’s fine too.”

Suzanne Vega – An Intimate Evening of Songs and Stories
When: Saturday, April 15, 8 p.m.
Where: Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua
Tickets: $49 and up at etix.com

Featured photo: Suzanne Vega. Courtesy photo.