Category: Nightlife

LaBelle Winery’s lights display glows with holiday cheer

Created during the pandemic as a way to provide socially distanced family fun, LaBelle Lights enters its fourth year bigger and better. Newly added is The Treehouse, a big glowing box that looks like twisted birch branches made of spun sugar. It’s a beacon for the Derry location of LaBelle Winery and a great Instagram photo spot that’s located right at the holiday trail’s start.

Along with other new display pieces like the caterpillar-shaped Blizzard Bend and more glowing evergreens dotting the Forest of Trees are new events and attractions to carry the holiday spirit into the new year. Perennial favorites like the twinkling giant teddy bear and ornament-shaped Proposal Ball still remain.

There are expanded food options.

“People like to eat along the way,” Michelle Thornton, the winery’s Marketing Director, said recently. “We have Santa’s Snack Shack, which is grab and go, and LaBelle Market, which looks like a French market all decorated for Christmas. They have cookies that are the size of a human head, I mean, they’re huge.”

Themes change weekly, and as Christmas passes the soundtrack moves from “Here Comes Santa Claus” to “Sleigh Ride” and “Winter Wonderland.” Upcoming is Crazy Holiday Hats week, where guests are encouraged to show off wild, wacky and holiday-appropriate headgear.

Frozen Costume Week happens Dec. 26 through Dec. 29 and includes a ticketed event on the first day. Ice Princess Party is a dress-up affair for youngsters that offers a dance party with cocoa and characters such as Snow Sister and Ice Boy, live story time and a puppet show. A meet and greet at the end provides ample photo opportunities.

A stroll through the glowing displays after is included with the $44 ticket ($34 for ages 2 through 10). “What’s so fun about this,” Thornton said, “is after kids are done engaging with characters, they can go right over to LaBelle Lights and walk through it in their costumes.”

Grown-ups will enjoy Flannel Week, which starts on New Year’s Eve, followed by ’80s Ski Week with retro winter gear encouraged. The final week of the attraction has WinterFest, celebrating all things related to the season, before LaBelle staff takes down everything and begins planning for next time.

Winery founder Amy LaBelle came up with the idea of transforming their golf course for winter, and nurtures it like it’s her own Disney World. “That’s Amy … anything that brings joy and makes memories, those things are part of her personal mantra,” Thornton said. “When she presented it to our leadership team, we all went, sure, we can do that, and then we had to figure out how, [but] we’re really good at taking a concept and bringing it to life.”

Thornton mentioned that families on a budget should be aware of Twinkle Tuesday. “That’s half price for everyone,” she said. “That was also Amy’s idea; she wanted it to be affordable for everyone. If someone was concerned about pricing for any reason, we created a whole night for them that’s the same exact experience — but it’s half price.”

Anyone looking to extend the experience can reserve an age-specific swag bag while booking tickets, but they’re quite popular. “They sell out,” Thornton said. “We’re making them constantly.” For the kiddos, the canvas tote bag has a light-up bulb necklace and holiday wand along with light-enhancing 3D glasses. Adults get a logoed winter beanie and a set of hand warmers, a glowing holiday ornament and a $5 market voucher.

For a few more days, attendees can also book a Santa Photo Experience. “Instead of getting your photo at the mall, you can get it in this environment, which is probably a lot less crazy,” Thornton said. “It’s very festive … you’re seeing Santa and then the kids get to let loose and go through the lights.”

Cool stuff to light up the season

From vinyl to attire, books and trinkets, there are many ways to make a music fan happy with the perfect holiday gift. Here are some ideas crossing genres and eras, including a few for local music aficionados.

Making music is fun, especially when it’s easy. One option is the Otamatone, which is shaped like an eighth note and sounds like the spawn of a synthesizer and a slide guitar. The emotively adorned Aggretsuko Rage version is $44.99 at hamee.com.

Or spring for the $159 Orba 3, Artiphon’s latest iteration of its music-in-the-palm-of-your-hand synthesizer, which starts with a massive library of drum sounds and adds sampling for miniature magic. Artiphon also makes the keyboard-shaped Chorda, both a standalone synthesizer and MIDI controller ($249.99 at artiphon.com).

For listening to music, headphones are a great gift that can range in price from the reasonable and well-regarded Status Audio 3ANC, the first in-ears with a dedicated bass speaker ($179, status.co). Audiophile legends Bang & Olufsen just introduced its high-end Beoplay H100 cans ($1,549, bang-olufsen.com) for the truly nice person on your list.

Affordable tabletop surround sound is available with the Ultimate Ears Wonderboom 4 portable Bluetooth speaker, a compact yet powerful unit costing $80 at most stores. For heavier listening, the 6-pound Marshall Acton III is a boomer that will evoke the giant amp it’s named after ($227.99 at amazon.com).

For something completely different in the portable speaker category, Uncommon Goods has a combination water bottle and Bluetooth unit that’s perfect for pop-up parties. It’s quite popular, though, and as of this writing it was sold out on the store’s website. Check for restocking at uncommongoods.com, a great stop for other gifts.

Speaking of one-stop shopping, it’s axiomatic that the best way to support local music is buying direct from your favorite artists. For those who can’t attend every show, the best alternative is the Bandcamp website (bandcamp.com). There, area bands make most of the money, unlike Spotify, where the CEO is richer than any musician on his site.

If your list includes a dedicated collector of vinyl albums, consider gifting them a Spin-Clean cleaning kit. Its $125 price tag may be too lofty; if so, there are some cheaper options available. The Discwasher D4+ Record Care System is the granddaddy of the bunch, dating back to the ’60s. It’s $25.

Of course, your giftee will need records to clean with their new gear. 2024 doesn’t disappoint. For the Swiftie on your list, Target offers a bunch of exclusives, including a double album of songs from The Tortured Poets Department with a bonus track (“The Manuscript”) on clear vinyl for $32.99. Give it with a copy of the massive Official Taylor Swift The Eras Tour book ($39.99) and you’ll be a hero.

For fans of an earlier era, the debut LP from an influential New Wave band recently received a deluxe treatment. Talking Heads: 77 introduced songs like “Psycho Killer” and “Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town” while hinting at adventurous music to come. The four-CD set has goodies including outtakes, Atmos mixes and a full-length CBGB show from October 1977.

Elvis Costello was another artist who evolved from that period, moving from angry young man to reverent roots-music adherent. The six-CD King Of America & Other Realms Super Deluxe begins with the 1986 album and includes new songs, along with beauties like a Grand Ole Opry performance of “The Scarlet Tide” from the Cold Mountain soundtrack accompanied by Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, and duets with Ralph Stanley and Larkin Poe.

While physical tickets have mostly been displaced by cell phone barcodes, dedicated concertgoers usually have a big collection of stubs. For those, consider a Ticket Stub Diary for preserving those memories. It will give them something to share with their children and grandkids one day ($29, uncommongoods.com).

Finally, let’s not forget stocking stuffers. Uncommon Goods is a great source for things like music playing cards with drawings of David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix and other rock stars. Mistaken Lyrics Coasters are fun if you’ve ever misheard this U2 song: “It’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright / Shamu, the mysterious whale.” Or get a mahogany thumb piano for your favorite fan.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Seán Heely’s Celtic Christmas comes to Nashua

In 2019, Seán Heely staged his first Celtic Christmas show for a few hundred people in his home base of Washington, D.C.

The next time he did it, the audience grew to 1,000, and it doubled the following year. It was clear that an appetite for Heely’s lively blend of fiddle, harp, pipes and other traditional instruments in the service of seasonal songs from the seven Celtic nations resonated, so he decided to take his show on the road.

Just in time for the tour, which stops in Nashua on Friday, Dec. 6, is a new holiday album that Heely and his all-star band will perform. So Merry as We Have Been is named for one of its songs, drawn from the 18th-century Scottish collection The Caledonian Pocket Companion.

The record, Heely said in a recent phone interview, offers classic Christmas carols, “reimagined in the Celtic way … a little bit more jiggified than they might be in the choral setting.” Along with Olde English carols like “I Saw Three Ships” and “Gloucestershire Wassail” are traditional numbers such as “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” and “Deck the Halls.”

Heely will sing “Silent Night” in three different languages, the original German, English and Gaelic — he was recently named U.S. Champion in the latter. “I’ve been doing a lot of Gaelic songs in the last couple of years, and studying the language pretty hard,” he said. “It’s great to see that recognized.”

On stage with Heely in Nashua are Kevin Elam on guitar and vocals — he’s earned multiple awards for singing, including a competition in Drogheda, Ireland, that only one other American has won in its 65-year history. Lucas Ashby is a Brazilian American percussionist who also plays cello, and Abbie Palmer is a well-regarded multi-genre harp player.

Beth Patterson hails from Louisiana. “She brings in a bit of Cajun French into the show,” Heely said. “We have a French song that she brought into the group; it’s like a Cajun epiphany song. She plays the bouzouki and the bass, electric bass, that’s our one electric instrument.”

The band’s youngest member is fiddler Colin McGlynn. Heely said he’s been playing with the 18-year-old McGlynn for nearly a decade. Jesse Ofgang is a Connecticut-born piper who plays the Highland Pipes, the Scottish Border Pipes, and the Irish Eland Pipes. Rounding out the group are dancers Agi Covacs and Rebecca Law.

Born into a musical family, Heely got into playing early. “My older sister played violin, and I wanted to do everything like her when I was young,” he said. So he picked it up too, “and as soon as I had about five notes that I could play pretty well, my dad had me playing with him. He played the banjo, so I joined the family band…. We played anything from maritime music to bluegrass to Irish and Scottish.”

He once told an interviewer that a fiddle is just a violin that’s had Guinness spilled on it, a glib statement that he somewhat regrets. “The headline ‘violinist with beer spilled on him’ made me sound like a little bit of an alcoholic,” he said, adding, “there are all kinds of funny jokes, like ‘a violin has strings, a fiddle has strangs,’ but there is no actual difference. It is just the way that you play it.”

That said, his interest in fiddle playing began with exploring his paternal grandmother’s record collection.

“We had songs from Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales floating around the house, and she played the piano, so I grew up listening to a lot of that kind of music and folk,” he said. “I’ve branched out a bit, and we even have stuff from Brittany in France and Galicia in Spain, the seven recognized Celtic nations. So that was what spurred me on.”

Also influencing Heely was the time he spent at Alistair Fraser’s fiddle camp on Scotland’s Isle of Skye. “It spurred me on to compete with Scottish fiddling and to keep pursuing that music, because there’s a lot more Irish fiddling in the U.S. than Scottish,” he said. “And of course, it’s so beautiful, all these mountains, the ocean and everything. When you’re playing the music in the place where it was made, it feels pretty special.”

Seán Heely’s Celtic Christmas
When: Friday, Dec. 6, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua
Tickets: $49 and up at etix.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Original songwriters at BNH Stage

By Michael Witthaus
[email protected]

An eight-week competition at Patrick’s Pub in Gilford sponsored by NH Music Collective culminates with performances from the winners and semi-finalists at the BNH Stage in downtown Concord on Dec. 1.

Singer-songwriter Ian Archibold took top honors in the final round on Nov. 18 and will headline the show. Second-place winner Ian Galipeau will perform ahead of Archibold, and Temple Mountain — the nom de tune of singer, guitarist and songwriter Eric Impallomeni — rounds out the bill-topping trio.

The rest of the performers are an eclectic bunch. Adrienne Mack-Davis offers hip-hop and R&B, Arthur Terembula has a rustic sound that’s somewhere between Tom Waits and a Smithsonian field recording, while Brendan Cleary, Willy Chase and Jason Oberstein sit comfortably in the folk, singer-songwriter genre.

The show is an excellent way for fans of original music to broaden their horizons. Take, for example, Ian Galipeau’s song “The Little Things.” A worthy counterpart to Jason Isbell’s “If We Were Vampires,” it distills a lifetime of love, marriage, parenthood and death with breathtaking precision. He’ll likely play that along with material from his 2022 album Like We Were Never Here At All and his most recent single, “Floorboard,” another storytelling gem.

Archibold released an EP, Parallel, in 2016, and cites influences ranging from The Beatles to Bruno Mars and Coldplay. His song “Valley of Uncertainty” is a good example of how he joins those disparate threads to craft a singular sound. He hails from Panama but has performed around the New England region for a while.

A well-traveled Long Island native, Temple Mountain blends deft finger-picking guitar with atmospheric vocalizing that recalls Elliot Smith, a singer-songwriter he cites as an influence. Lyrically idiosyncratic, with a bio stating that he has “a psychology background,” his songs charmingly probe the human experience.

NHMC is riding a successful wave of late. The idea for its monthly Sunday Sessions is to book a local performer in the BNH Stage’s intimate Cantin Room, then move into the main theater when ticket sales hit a certain level. This month, Charlie Chronopoulos sold out the big space, and a few months earlier, singer/songwriter Taylor Hughes came within a few dozen seats of doing the same.

“So far, we’ve had three shows go to the big stage,” NHMC principal John McArthur said by phone recently. “We book a lot of bar gigs … breweries and wineries, stuff like that, where they’re doing mostly cover songs. But this opportunity to perform original music in front of a listening audience, this is what I live for.”

The third annual singer/songwriter contest at Patrick’s attracted entries from as far away as Rhode Island. “This is how starved indie artists are,” McArthur said. “People that in past years would have gotten in didn’t. We’re trying to build a community of songwriters and indie singing, and it’s starting to work.”
Brad Myrick, who founded the musician-friendly organization, agreed with his partner McArthur.

“I love that we can tie one thing that we’re doing to support songwriters and original music and segue that into a proper theater show promoted well and in a city like Concord that has some movement,” he said. “These are the kinds of things that I didn’t have the ability to do five or 10 years ago … that we’ve grown to where we can do that feels really good.”

It’s a two-way street for artists and NHMC, which books a wide range of area venues, Myrick continued.

“John set up the open mic as a way to have a forum to hear some new people and invite some folks,” he said. “It’s opened up some new performers for us, and it works great for them. They come up here and get new fans. It’s building something. I want people to say there’s a scene in New Hampshire. I want that to be felt and be real.”

NHMC Sunday Sessions: Songwriter Showcase
When: Sunday, Dec. 1, 6 p.m.
Where: BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $18.75 at ccanh.com

Featured photo: First, second and third place winners of the Patrick’s Pub Songwriter Competition. Pictured L to R: Ian Archibold, Ian Galipeau, Temple Mountain. Courtesy photos..

British Invasion Years revisits ’60s

When The Beatles debuted on American television in February 1964, it was a shot heard ’round the world, and the ensuing onslaught of artists from across the pond forever revolutionized music. At the same time, something else happened, as musicians on this side of the Atlantic traded their Martin acoustic guitars for Rickenbackers and responded in kind.

Roger McGuinn, for example, ditched folk music and formed The Byrds, redefining Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” as a jangly, electric rocker. All across the nation bands came together, and the landscape changed. This call and response social moment is captured by British Invasion Years, performing Nov. 23 at Tupelo Music Hall.

“We use the American Revolution as a metaphor … but instead of hurling ammunition back and forth, these bands were throwing hits,” Lee Howard, who plays guitar and sings, said during a recent phone interview that included bass player and vocalist Bob Murdock. “Their battle was for the top spot in the charts.”

Howard and Murdock, along with drummer Dave Hall and Jon Wolf, who plays keyboards and guitar, begin their show as an all-British affair, churning out hits by the Fab Four, Herman’s Hermits, The Who, Moody Blues, Rolling Stones, Kinks and others. Act 2 is the American musical response.

One element separating them from other tribute acts is the precision brought to their task. They’re focused on replicating the studio sound of the songs they play down to the tiniest element. For example, “Time of the Season” by the Zombies opens with a percussive sound that’s either a hand clap or a wood block; the band was equally divided on which.

To settle it, they messaged Zombies lead singer Colin Blunstone on Facebook, who confirmed it was a single hand clap. “It was a very fun but testy debate,” Murdock recalled. “We never really argue in the band, but in the end, it’s always the song that wins.”

Howard agreed. “It’s an example of how far we go to try and replicate as closely as possible the music that we’re doing,” he said. The group is equally exacting in its presentation, donning Beatles suits and other garb worn by bands during the transition from three-minute singles to concept albums like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

They also employ multimedia, like a photo of The Monkees’ Davy Jones alongside Maureen McCormick, who played Marcia on the sitcom The Brady Bunch. It always sparks a raucous audience reaction. Other nostalgia triggers include trolls, Twister boards and Peter Fonda on his Easy Rider Harley.

“We conceptualized this [with] a screen that would project images and bring back those feelings of the day … people do respond to it,” Howard said; he designed that part of the show. “It’s great because we get to tug on emotional heartstrings not only sonically, but visually too.”

It’s a big part of the show’s second half, which can include everything from Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” to “Sugar, Sugar” by The Archies. The outfits for that section are, Murdock said, “very hippie-ish, headbands and vests,” reflecting a time that was “all about peace and love.”

Asked for a nugget from the era that they personally love playing, both of them demur. That’s like naming a favorite child, Murdock asserts. “You love them all for different reasons.” Howard likes the Moody Blues’ “Tuesday Afternoon” because it surprises most audiences.

There’s good news on that front for New England fans, however. Everyone in the band enjoys rolling out Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline,” so Red Sox fans can rejoice! “The audience reacts to that song amazingly, they sing along and wave their hands,” Murdock said. “You get a little glimpse into Neil Diamond’s concert life when he used to sing that.”

Howard believes that the band’s note for note fastidiousness has something to do with it. “Most bands don’t like to do it because it’s not a cool sounding song if you don’t do it right,” he said. “We do it like the record and people flip out. There is something psychological behind that … when people hear what they’re accustomed to hearing, they get a warm, fuzzy feeling.”

British Invasion Years
When: Saturday, Nov. 23, 8 p.m.
Where: Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry
Tickets: $39 at tupelohall.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.