Author: Michael Witthaus

Will Hatch celebrates new EP with release show

While the making of Will Hatch’s first full-length album For You might be likened to a marathon, his new EP Downtown was more of a sprint. With extensive studio time and a long back and forth between Hatch and producer Immanuel the Liberator, he spent over two years finishing the 2018 disc.

This time around, it took just one day.

Will Hatch & Co. — the singer-songwriter, guitarist Taylor Pearson, mandolin player Brian Peasley and a rhythm section of drummer Eric Ober and bassist Jon Cheney — rolled into Cambridge’s Bridge Sound & Stage in mid-October and knocked out Downtown’s six songs with alacrity.

Financial necessity was one reason for the quick turnaround. Money for studio time came from a single summer show, as the pandemic battered the music business. More than that, the band was primed.

“We’ve been playing together for the past few years. … The lineup’s solidified, we’ve become a tighter unit,” Hatch said in a recent phone interview. “Plus, nobody’s playing a lot of gigs this year so we were just practicing over the summer.”

The approach that day — polish a track, do the take and move on to the next effort — worked perfectly and produced a spirited, capable effort.

“We just wanted to do everything live and reflect what this band sounds like,” Hatch said, “rather than getting into a whole, you know, big studio creation.”

The title cut, an upbeat country rocker about relationship breakdown, illustrates the group’s chemistry, while providing a template for the album, Hatch said.

“While my solo performances are more melancholic, the band thrives on raucous crowds and barroom antics,” he said. “Late-night Concord is a theme that runs throughout the tracks.”

Another high-energy highlight is a cover of “They’re Red Hot (Hot Tamales)” — perhaps the most rollicking song in blues legend Robert Johnson’s catalog. Hatch calls it one of his favorites on the new record.

“We’ve been playing it a long time and it’s not an easy one, so I was pretty proud that we pulled that off,” he said. “It’s a fun song with a lot of weird changes and I was happy we were able to do that.”

The EP’s other cover is “Waterbound,” a traditional folk song. The band also enjoyed laying down the last track of the day, “Beer Bottle Blues.”

“It has electric guitars on it, so it’s a little more rock,” he said. “I think we were all happy with how that one came out; it’s real clean and nice.”

The anchor of Downtown is the ballad “Kid From Holden” is based on a real tragedy, the 2015 drowning death of Plymouth State University student Jake Nawn. Hatch describes friends leaving books by Nawn’s favorite writers with notes inserted in them to try and lure him out of the woods, and the frantic desperation of his family as the search dragged on. It’s a spellbinding story song.

“How many times did I pass him? / I never will know,” sings Hatch of Nawn, an aspiring writer beloved by classmates. “A poet he lived and a poet he died, but the river just came and it went.”

Hatch spoke of his need to “keep retelling stories about local tragedies and keep them alive through folk music.”

A release show at Penuche’s Ale House will have a smaller, socially distanced crowd. With the recent spike in cases, it’s still scheduled to happen.

“I don’t want to jinx anything, because everything is getting canceled,” Hatch said. “We’re just happy to have the opportunity to play out , even if it’s a small crowd. It’s just still nice for us to keep playing.”

Will Hatch & Co.
When: Saturday, Dec. 12, 8 p.m.
Where: Penuche’s Ale House, 6 Pleasant St., Concord
More: willhatchmusic.com

Featured photo: Will Hatch & Co. Courtesy photo.

Dual platform comedy show

On more than one level, Mike Koutrobis knows the strange reality of entertainment in the Covid era. Most Sundays he’s on the sidelines of New England Patriots home games, doing various jobs, from camera assistant to holding a sound dish, for whatever network is broadcasting the game. Right now, the stands are largely empty as fans watch the action safely from home.

“They pump in crowd noise. It’s an illusion,” he said. “It’s weird, but amazing to be there.”

The veteran comedian found a similarly novel way to share his act. For an upcoming show at Zinger’s in Milford, he’ll share the stage with Kelly MacFarland, as a live audience of a dozen or more people watches along with a virtual crowd. The latter will face Koutrobis from two giant flat screens in the back of the room.

“I’m literally looking at the Zoom crowds as if they’re in the audience,” he said, likening the experience to watching the opening credits of The Brady Bunch. Hecklers aren’t a problem, but crowd work isn’t impossible. “You can go, ‘Hey, left corner with a weird couch.’ … You can use it in your act, and it feels like you’re interacting with them.”

How to talk about the virus is “a million-dollar question,” he said. Comics are obliged to say something about it, but the truth is people come to comedy shows to escape that. It’s a high-wire act.

“I think the big phrase is making people feel OK that they’re not the only ones going through it — here’s how to think about it in another way,” he said.

Still, the pandemic gave Koutrobis plenty of new material.

“One of my first jokes is not even a joke,” he said. “I said, people lost a lot — jobs, family and friends. I’ve lost something very dear to my heart, and that’s the ability to button my pants since April.”

On the other hand, Koutrobis’s act has always focused on relationships, evolving from dating to marriage and parenthood. The quarantine simply added another wrinkle.

“I’m 50 years old with an 18-month-old kid, and I’m stuck in the house, so I’ve got a lot of that to go off,” he said. “I don’t care how much you love somebody, if you’re stuck in the same place, you gotta learn to adjust. So I have jokes showing my frustration but also how we’re making it work.”

Koutrobis was one of the first comics to work after quarantine ended in May, playing the kickoff drive-in show at Tupelo Music Hall in Derry, an experience he described as “disconnected. … I didn’t feel the flow like I usually do when I’m doing it every weekend.”

Later, shows got more comfortable.

“I was able to hook up with Amherst Country Club, and I found a couple of breweries,” he said. “People brought lawn chairs and I set up a portable stage; that way, people can sit as far away as possible. It started becoming … I’ll never say normal, but almost normal. We had enough people in the room or in the grass to at least feel like a crowd was there.”

He’s had his share of surreal moments, however, like one show done at a Milford retirement home as a favor.

“It really was only like 12 people, all sitting in a huge room, 15 feet away from each other,” he said. “I’m at the front on the stage, but because of the place I was in I had to wear my mask. So I’m telling jokes to senior citizens who can barely hear in the first place, with a muffled mask on.”

That’s not to say Koutrobis wouldn’t do it again.

“These are the things we’ve had to adjust to,” he said. “It’s a lot, but I can’t not perform. So I kind of take what I can.”

Mike Koutrobis & Kelly MacFarland
When: Friday, Dec. 4, 8 p.m.
Where: Zinger’s, 29 Mont Vernon St., Milford
Tickets: Live $20 and Zoom $10 at tinyurl.com/yy8sjsdn

Featured photo: Mike Koutrobis. Courtesy photo.

Americana band Raid the Larder performs

Raid the Larder perfectly illustrates the intersectionality of Concord’s music scene. At its core are Taylor Pearson and Brian Peasley, two friends who started playing punk rock together 10 years ago in high school. When Pearson introduced Peasley to the Grateful Dead and its all-acoustic cousin Old & In the Way, he picked up a mandolin and the two morphed into a younger version of Jerry Garcia and David Grisman.

They called themselves Hometown Eulogy. The moniker came from a song by Tristan Omand, a local rocker turned folkie who inspired their rustic turn.

“His albums seem to come to me in certain places in my life where I need it the most,” Peasley said in a recent phone interview. “Me and Taylor were really loving that first album of his. We’re like, ‘Hometown Eulogy just sounds like a badass name.’”

A couple of years ago Peasley heard Ryan Nicholson playing with a band called Oddfellows Way at a craft beer festival. Learning the guitarist also played banjo, he suggested an impromptu jam session; the two clicked immediately. Later he discovered that Nicholson would soon be moving to Concord.

Peasley connected with guitarist Mac Holmes after watching him play in Plymouth, where he lived.

“I was like, ‘This guy’s amazing — I need him. I wanted a full bluegrass band,” he said.

Holmes ended up traveling to Concord so frequently that he eventually relocated to the city.

“The bass player was the hard part,” Peasley said.

He knew Scott Heron and his wife, fiddler Betsey Green, from their time jamming with singer-songwriter Will Hatch.

“Will was starting to get a band together when he moved back up here from Virginia and he found Scott and Betsy.”

As the two grew occupied with their own project, Green Heron, Hatch cast about for new players.

“Me and Taylor were playing in a band called the Graniteers with our friend Nick Ferrero from high school. … We ended up playing shows with Will,” Peasley said.

He suggested a jam session with Hatch.

“Will’s like, ‘Oh yeah, that’d be fun,’ and it ended up being a Pizza Tapes kind of thing,” he said.

They became friends with Heron and Green in the process. So, when an upright bassist was needed, Heron agreed to join. Raid the Larder played its first show in December 2018, with Green guesting on fiddle. Travel to and from Kingston made it too much for the couple. Heron left, and Nicholson recruited Adam Martin, who’d just left Oddfellows Way to take his place. The band’s lineup now consists of Peasley on mandolin, guitarists Pearson and Holmes, Nicholson playing banjo and Martin on bass.

For now they’re all about playing together whenever they can, and haven’t made a record — yet.

“I want to get together and play these songs that I’ve been covering for years, but with a full band,” Peasley said. “We do everything from old Carter Family tunes to Modest Mouse to Jimmy Buffett. I would love to do a recording because we all bring originals from the different bands we’ve come from; it’s a big collaboration. I think Mac doesn’t care if we recorded or anything. He just wants to play.”

Peasley also hosts the weekly open mic at Penuche’s, where Raid the Larder will perform two days after Thanksgiving. He and Pearson also appear regularly at another Concord hub for local music, Area 23. They two co-led a weekly songwriters night a while back, inviting local performers over to play their originals.

Pearson and Peasley always join in, and the evenings often provide a full flavor of one of the state’s most burgeoning and enjoyable scenes.

“Me and Taylor, learning people’s songs,” Peasley said. “It’s just what we do.”

Raid the Larder
When: Saturday, Nov. 28, 8 p.m.
Where: Penuche’s Ale House, 16 Bicentennial Square, Concord
More: facebook.com/raidthelarder

Featured photo: Raid the Larder. Courtesy photo.