Author: Michael Witthaus

NH Irish Festival an indoor/outdoor bash

According to the New England Historical Society, more than one in five of New Hampshire’s residents claim Irish ancestry. The lure of factory jobs led a wave of immigration from Ireland to Manchester in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Emerald Isle’s cultural presence has grown steadily since, particularly when it comes to music.

Thus, the upcoming New Hampshire Irish Festival won’t be a one-night affair in a single venue. Rather, it will stretch across two days in downtown Manchester, with shows at both the spacious Palace Theatre and the more intimate Rex. An outdoor stage will offer free live music prior to both shows.

Liam Spain is a musician who’s performed traditional Irish and folk music for decades with his brother Mickey. The two are close to completing a new album they’ll release next year. He also works for the Palace, and CEO Peter Ramsey asked him to pull together a list of artists for an event similar in spirit to last year’s Jazz Festival there.

Spain leaned into the task and was elated when all his first-call performers said yes. Ronan Tynan will headline two nights at the Palace, along with Screaming Orphans and Derek Warfield & the Young Wolfe Tones. At the Rex, it’s two shows from Reverie Road, a supergroup with members of Solas and Gaelic Storm, along with Belfast native Seamus Kennedy, and the Spain Brothers.

“It represents the whole gamut of Irish music,” Spain said in a recent phone interview. “There’s Ronan, a traditional tenor. Then you have the folk and ballad stuff with Seamus, the tunes with Reverie Road, and with Screaming Orphans you get the Irish pop and rock. It covers all the bases.”

Spain is also very keen on Derek Warfield’s latest project, which draws its name from the trad group he cofounded in 1965. “This new band of his has amazing musicians,” he said. “It does some of the Wolfe Tones stuff; it’s still very much folk but very melodic — there’s a lot of mixture in the music.”

Screaming Orphans are the four Diver sisters, Joan, Angela, Gràinne and Marie Thérèse, who hail from Bundoran in Ireland’s County Donegal. Along with releasing a dozen albums — their latest, Taproom, made the Billboard World Music Top 10 — they’re also known for backing Sinead O’Connor on a couple of tours. They’ve also recorded with Peter Gabriel, and sang with Joni Mitchell when she contributed to a Chieftains album.

Outdoor activities begin at 5 p.m. on Friday with Speed the Plough, followed by Pat Kelleher (appearing both days), with local favorite Marty Quirk doing the final pre-concert set. Saturday kicks off at noon with Kelleher, followed by Christine Morrison’s Academy of Celtic Dance. Husband-and-wife duo Matt and Shannon Heaton and Erin Og, both Boston-based trad acts, close out the free music.

The Spain Brothers perform infrequently, now that Mickey Spain lives in North Carolina. “We do our playing and touring strategically whenever he comes up,” Liam said. Along with the festival, they’re in New York and have a couple of other regional shows.

Beyond that, in November the two will bring fans along for a nine-day trek through Ireland run by Brack Tours. It stops in Kilkenny, Galway and Dublin; they’ll play at least four shows. The trip includes a tour of the Smithwick’s brewery and stops at historical spots like Rock of Cashel, Bunratty Castle, Glengowla Mines and Athlone & Sean’s Bar, Ireland’s oldest pub.

Spain is excited about the cultural exchange happening in his hometown. “It’s going to be a great weekend of music,” he said, adding that Hanover Street will be closed for outdoor activities. “Our plan is to have the Palace bar, as well as a food truck or two. So it’s going to have a little street fair element as well.”

New Hampshire Irish Festival
When: Friday, Aug. 25, at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, Aug. 26, at 6 p.m.
Where: Palace Theatre, 80 Hanover St., and Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $49 at palacetheatre.org
Free outdoor performances start at 5 p.m. on Friday and noon on Saturday

Featured photo: Screaming Orphans. Courtesy photo.

No More Blue Tomorrows celebrates debut LP

Anyone searching for hope in the regional music scene will be heartened by No More Blue Tomorrows. The Nashua trio’s eponymous first album covers a bevy of bases, all of them well. The opening track, “It’s Kind of a Funny Story,” pulses with power, recalling a young, hungry Green Day. It’s followed by the cowpunk rave-up “Lonely.”

This scorching one-two punch continues with a masterpiece of symphonic pop. “If You’re Around” is a lost-love power ballad that builds to a roaring crescendo recalling the Goo Goo Dolls’ ’90s hit “Iris.” With cello, violin and layered harmonies, the song improves with each listen.

Lead singer and principal lyricist Connor Coburn co-wrote it with Cameron Gilhooly, his former bandmate in Hunter. Coburn left the group, along with NMBT bass player Peter Davis, in 2019. The way it came to be is, to continue a theme, something of a funny story, Coburn explained in a recent phone interview.

“Me and Zak [Lombard, NMBT guitarist] started recording it at the studio one night, really late,” he said. “We’re drinking, smoking cigarettes. Peter was out partying somewhere, and he came back. It’s like two in the morning, and I say, ‘Hey, Peter, record your guitar parts, record your drum parts.’ We’re doing all this recording at three in the morning when we’re all kind of drunk, and it just works.”

The band’s moniker references a line from the David Lynch movie Inland Empire. Its cool sound is the main reason Coburn and his mates chose it, but also because picking a name can be harder than writing a song, and they were exhausted by the process. “It’s the worst part of being in a band,” he said, adding that maybe there is a bit more to it.

“If you want a deeper … fake explanation, it’s in a very dark scene in the movie, but it has kind of a positive sound to it. So it has this kind of duality…. I think our music kind of has that too. It’s a little dark and a little somber and a little edgy, but also kind of upbeat and fun.”

They do get playful, on “For Forever,” an Americana romp with honey-sweet pedal steel guitar that’s another of many album highlights. Another gem is “Real as a Heart Attack,” a country punk car chase of a song that draws from many of Coburn’s biggest inspirations.

“Whiskey Town is a big influence of mine, and Ryan Adams,” he said. “Rhett Miller, obviously Old 97s is a huge influence, but also old-school ’70s punk and ’80s punk. It’s a lot of different things, but we managed to bring it together.”

Many of the songs came out of Coburn leaving Hunter after five years with the NEMA-winning group. He and Davis quit on the same night.

“We were both feeling like we had outgrown the band in a sense,” he said. “It just kind of stopped working at a certain point. I needed to do my own thing and have a little bit more freedom.”

There aren’t any hard feelings, he continued; it was simply time to move on.

“We all still talk, there’s no animosity, but things had gotten kind of rocky at the end. I was like, yeah, I’m already writing songs with them and for them, I may as well just do this for myself with more creative leeway. Peter was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do that.’”

The first song completed in the wake of Hunter’s dissolution was “Chaperone,” which Coburn began while still in the band. “I wrote it in the van while we were on tour,” he said. “We had even started playing bits of it in shows. Me and Cam would sound check with it, play a verse or two. That was kind of the first song that really got me out of that band. … Musically, it signified a pretty big shift for me. It’s kind of a punky, anti-conformity song.”

NMBT first played live in mid-2021 and have gigged “relentlessly” all over New England. They have four area appearances to close out the month. They’re in Nashua at Penuche’s Aug. 17, San Francisco Kitchen Aug. 24 and Peddler’s Daughter on Aug. 25 — the latter is a release show, then Labelle Winery in Amherst on Aug. 31.

With an album finally out, they’re ready to take the next step and tour nationally, but for now will savor the achievement.

“We listened to the final mix [and] the whole time, we were like, holy crap, did we create this?” Coburn said. “It’s funny when it goes from the stage of a dive bar to a record that sounds really good and you’re really happy with.”

No More Blue Tomorrows
When: Thursday, Aug. 17, 6 p.m.
Where: Penuche’s, 4 Canal St., Nashua
More: nomorebluetomorrows.com
Album release show on Saturday, Aug. 25, 9:30 p.m., Peddler’s Daughter, 48 Main St., Nashua

Featured photo: No More Blue Tomorrows. Courtesy photo.

Gov’t Mule plays Pink Floyd; Led Zeppelin opens

In terms of bang for buck, it’s hard to beat the upcoming Gov’t Mule show at Bank of New Hampshire Pavilion. It includes guitarist Warren Haynes leading his band through an opening set including familiar tracks and up to half a dozen songs from Peace… Like a River, their just released gem of an album. Without a break, they’ll morph into Pink Floyd, reviving Dark Side of the Mule with enough lasers and lights to transform the audience back to the 1970s.

Gov’t Mule is bringing back the show, first performed at Boston’s Orpheum Theatre on Halloween 2008, to mark Dark Side of the Moon’s 50th anniversary. They aren’t playing the classic 1973 album from start to finish, though they’ll touch on a lot of it. Rather, they’ll draw from the entirety of Floyd’s catalog, from Meddle to The Wall.

On “Have a Cigar” drummer Matt Abts changes one lyric to, “Oh, by the way, which one’s the Mule?” In other words, this is a tribute, but stamped clearly by the band performing it.

“It’s a tough line to draw because we want to be very reverent and respectful of the original versions,” Warren Haynes said by phone recently. “At the same time, there’s no point in just copying it…. If we can’t do it our own way, then there’s really no reason to do it.”

Halloween cover shows are a Mule tradition. “We do some crazy theme and give ourselves permission to play somebody else’s music,” Haynes explained. But when fans began clamoring for a release of the Boston Floyd set, it surprised them a bit. “In the past, we’ve only done it once and never looked back.”

On this tour, Mule — Haynes, Abts, David Louis on keys and new bassist Kevin Scott — is joined by Jackie Greene on guitar and vocals and saxophone player Joe Holloway. Machan Taylor and Sophia Ramos on backing vocals add an authentic stamp. “Machan toured with Pink Floyd, and she was on the original live recording … that started this whole thing,” Haynes said.

As expected, the set list changes from night to night, though not as much as Gov’t Mule switches things up, with nuggets and familiar tracks.

“You’ll dig it if you’re not a hardcore Floyd fan, but if you are, you’ll dig it as well,” Haynes said. We’re trying to cover a lot of ground, especially the stuff that we connect with, that we feel we can capture and make our own thing.”

Led Zeppelin, in the form of Jason Bonham’s tribute to his father’s classic rock band, opens the packed night. For Haynes, the combined Zep/Floyd punch is a lot of fun. “His band is great, let’s start with that,” he said. “They came to Island Exodus, the Jamaica destination event that we do every January. Jason and I, and Jason and Gov’t Mule, have played together in the past. When it got brought up, everybody seemed to think that from a fan perspective it would be fantastic.”

Tucked between the classic rock songs is some of the band’s best work in years. During the pandemic Haynes experienced a creative tsunami that produced two albums, the Grammy-nominated Heavy Load Blues and Peace… Like A River. Both were done at the same time in late 2021 at Power Station New England. A big room was set up for the new songs, and a smaller studio was equipped with vintage gear for making blues.

“We didn’t wear headphones; I was just singing through a small monitor like we [were] in a little club or something,” Haynes said of the setting for Heavy Load. “We would go in around noon and work on Peace… Like A River till about 9 p.m., then take a dinner break and then move next door and play blues the rest of the night.”

Songs like “Made My Peace,” “Same As It Ever Was” and “Peace I Need” are reflective, brimming with the sense that it was a crossroads moment of sorts for Haynes. On the other hand, there’s hope on the gospel-tinged “Just Across the River,” which has Celisse guesting, and “Dreaming Out Loud,” with co-lead vocals from Haynes, Ruthie Foster and Ivan Neville. The latter includes samples John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other inspirational leaders.

“I love the way that turned out,” Haynes said. “It made sense to have different voices singing these different quotes.”

He added that lyrically there’s a balance leaning toward better days. “I didn’t want to go into some dark place that I’d be uncomfortable confronting years down the line. I wanted to think of it more like an awakening … moving forward, getting past the challenges,” Haynes said. “A lot of the songs are written about the search for inner peace and awakenings and reckonings within yourself. Some of it is very universal and a lot of it even has a positive message. But it’s more about coming to terms with how to move forward when things are a bit dire, you know?”

Gov’t Mule w/ Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening
When: Thursday, Aug. 17, 7 p.m.
Where: Bank of New Hampshire Pavilion, 72 Meadowbrook Lane, Gilford
Tickets: $25 and up at livenation.com

Featured photo: Gov’t Mule. Photo by David Simchock.