Category: Nightlife

Ward Hayden & the Outliers bring Springsteen tribute to Pembroke

By Michael Witthaus

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When Pembroke City Limits scheduled its grand opening last year, owner Rob Azevedo had Ward Hayden & the Outliers booked to play, but the debut of the Suncook music bar and restaurant was delayed. Instead, the Boston country stalwarts performed in Azevedo’s barn, the place that gave him the idea to start his own club.

Hayden will finally make it to PCL on May 17, to do a trio show with bass player Greg Hall and guitarist Tyler Marshall. His latest project is two albums of Bruce Springsteen songs done in Outliers style. The first, Little By Little, arrived last month, and the next, Piece By Piece, is due for release in October.

Little By Little is a mix of familiar hits like “Dancing in the Dark” and “Cadillac Ranch” alongside deep cuts, such as the brooding “Youngstown” and “Two Faces.” One track, “Promised Land,” bubbled up after Azevedo gave Hayden a book on tape of Bruce’s autobiography when he complained about not having time to read his hard copy.

“It’s a driving song that Springsteen wrote before he even really knew how to drive, which — I think that is so cool when it comes to creative writing,” Hayden said by phone recently. The episode happened when his band lost a car and driver on its way west. “He has to learn how to drive, but he can’t shift … to be in that moment, and put that song together.”

One bit of inspiration came about when Hayden patiently endured a drunken fan’s attempt to tell him about two stripped down concerts Springsteen did in 1990. “He wasn’t giving up on trying to try to communicate with me, so I put my hand on his shoulder, looked him in the eye and said, ‘Tell me what you’re saying.’”

“Ward, you gotta hear the Christic shows,” came the reply. So he found them on YouTube. “I was blown away.”

For the same reason Springsteen’s Nebraska is revered by many as his best album, the music is spellbinding; it’s raw and revealing. But a story Springsteen told to introduce “My Father’s House,” about asking a therapist to help him understand why he drove around late at night looking at places he once lived and being told he was trying to make a bad thing right is what closed Hayden.

“The value of that song became clear to me at that point, I was so moved,” he said. “I don’t know if that song is going to be a single or anything, but I think it’s my favorite.” That and another song from Nebraska, “Reason to Believe,” will be on the Piece By Piece collection. The latter almost didn’t get recorded.

“I wanted to rock that song … but it just was not coming together in our very last day in the studio,” Hayden said. They got unstuck by reducing the backing track to Hall’s upright bass, a bit of strumming and tambourine. “All it really needed was a very steady and driving bass to tell the story. I was trying to bring it somewhere it didn’t need to go.”

The effort, its names drawn from “Racing in the Street,” came about for a strange but fitting reason. While Hayden and his band were driving to a show in the Midwest a couple of years ago, an interview came on the radio. A former rocker, a tick away from Nickelback, was attempting to jump-start a new country direction by urging people not to listen to The Boss.

“Everyone’s trying to find an angle and work it, it’s the nature of the entertainment business,” Hayden said. “But I felt he was trying to take away something that shouldn’t be taken away. Springsteen’s music has been such a huge part of so many people’s lives, myself included. I think there’s some things of value that should be sacred, or at least protected.”

What followed was “a project without an endgame,” he continued. The initial plan was to record two songs. “The first day we turned two into three … we ended up doing about a week more of recording a little later that month, and then we just didn’t stop. We chipped away, little by little, piece by piece, for about two years and ultimately ended up with 16 songs.”

Along with all the Boss’s songs, he wrote enough original material for a new album. His last was 2023’s introspective South Shore. On his website, Hayden said his Springsteen reinterpretation helped him “say some things that I’ve not been able to say myself yet in my own work.”

Asked to elaborate, he replied, “Some subjects … are hard to face … and not always easy to share. He had a challenging relationship with his father; the autobiography really laid that out. It was important to do a couple songs like ‘My Father’s House’ and ‘Walk Like a Man’ [that] really hit home. There are things I haven’t been able to dive into yet myself, but he did it so well.”

Ward Hayden & the Outliers (Trio)

When: Saturday, May 17, 6 p.m.
Where: Pembroke City Limits, 134 Main St., Suncook
More: wardhaydenandtheoutliers.com

Featured photo. Courtesy photo.

House Lights celebrate new release at Shaskeen

It’s been two years since post-hardcore alt metal band House Lights released their debut album, What It Means To Feel. The Manchester alt-metal band has a new EP, The Past is Ours to Leave, and will celebrate its release with a three-city tour that kicks off at Shaskeen Pub on May 9.

The new disc shows strong musical growth and offers the group’s first collaboration. Rapper Animatronic, The Abolisher contributed words and vocals to “Heavenfall,” a song with a strong Linkin Park feel. House Lights singer and lyricist Sam Beachard first gave the song to the band’s composer Matt Laramie, who thought the rapper could provide something extra.

“That was a really fun collab,” Beachard said in a recent phone interview. “It’s such a dynamic and unique track for us, where it’s something we haven’t really explored before, getting into more of the nu-metal and adding rap into the music style. What he did on it was really cool, and really special.”

At Laramie’s urging, Beachard sent the song’s chorus to Animatronic. “He wrote around it; his verses were a million times better than what I came up with; they fit the song perfectly. He understood the emotion, the feel of the song. He knocked it out of the park.” The rapper will join the band to perform the track at the Shaskeen show.

Along with Manchester, the mini-tour stops in Lowell and Worcester.

“We wanted to do a weekend tour … an experience none of us really have yet,” Beachard said. “We’ve got the EP release coming up, so what better reason to do it than for that? Make a whole weekend out of it … maximize the promotion and the scale of what we’re trying to do.”

The new EP has a unifying theme of an addictive relationship and its consequences. This is a band that dropped a cover of Olivia Rodrigo’s “Driver’s License” a while back, a punked-up rager that made a few wonder what might have been if she chose an edgier artistic path. So it’s not a stretch, really.

“Butterfly-inducing love has devolved into a harmful cycle of gaslighting and psychological abuse,” Beachard explained. “The victim is aware of every betrayal and malicious act, but has dealt with it for so long as a tradeoff for how the good times make them feel, that they can no longer extricate themselves from this negative environment.”

This mood is best represented on the driving “Forget You,” which traces a path from “seventeen, when everything was bare and bittersweet” to “walking hand in hand together with knives behind our backs.” The song is carried by a jagged rhythm of switching melodic vocals and growling metallic screaming, and it’s a gem.

It’s also not autobiographical, Beachard said. “A lot of the songs I write are about things within my own brain. Oftentimes you get into this mode where you live a version of yourself. Sometimes your mind can kind of wander on you and explore. You start to think about what the other versions would be like and how would my life be different.”

Beachard books most of his band’s gigs, but the Shaskeen show is under the auspices of Aaron Shelton’s Kinetic City Events. Outside of House Lights shows, he’s been working with the organization more. “Aaron’s got a lot of opportunities coming his way, a lot of people reaching out for him to help them get a solid program going; but he’s only one guy.”

He’s worked on similar efforts since House Lights formed.

“I want to be part of whoever and wherever people are helping other bands get opportunities in the scene,” he said. “There are a lot of incredible musicians right now, and all they need is opportunity, people to get eyes on them, and people that are looking out for them as well.”

House Lights Release Show w/ Sleepspirit, Moments Of and Empty Halls
When: Friday, May 8, 8 p.m.
Where: Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester
Tickets: $15 at the door, 21+

Featured photo. House Lights. Courtesy photo.

Tribute act opens with original rock

One of many tribute acts to form in the aftermath of Ronnie James Dio’s death in 2010, Seattle band Rising moved from imitation to emulation six years ago. Renamed RivetSkull, with singer Chad McMurray, Mark Plog on guitar, bass player Michael Robson and Mark Hopkins on drums, began playing out, and released an album of original songs in 2022.

Trail of Souls: Samsara and 2024’s follow-up Absence of Time hewed musically to the spirit of Dio’s career, which ranged from Rainbow to Black Sabbath and finally the eponymous group he led until stomach cancer claimed him. For example, the roiling, frenetic “Hellbound,” which opens their most recent LP, has clear Sabbath and Dio influences.

While they enjoy playing original material, in the time since switching over, RivetSkull has considered returning to Dio’s music. Recently they found a solution that works on both fronts: opening with their own songs, then doing an extended set of tribute music. On May 3, they’ll appear at Rock n Roll Meatballs in Manchester.

As Chad McMurray explained in a recent phone interview, “basically [we] open for ourselves, let people experience what RivetSkull is as an original band, and then also treat them to something that we did pretty well at,” he said, “which was the music of Ronnie James Dio.”

The decision was both artistic and practical, McMurray continued. “We were joking occasionally about doing a Dio show again. We started running through some of the songs again, and it was like, man, this feels pretty good, you know? And so we said, hey, well, what if we do a thing where we go out and basically try to do two things?”

They did a couple of test market shows, “and people showed up,” he continued. “So we’re like, ‘hey, OK, this could be fun.’ We can actually kill two birds with one stone, and keep Dio’s music and legacy out there live a little bit for people that never got to ever experience that, and turn people on to what we’re doing.”

The business part made even more sense for the indie metal band.

“It’s tougher to make a splash these days … get attention, get publicity, get people to show up at a show even, especially if you’re not on a label or being promoted,” he said. “But tribute acts have always managed to do fairly well. I’ve done a fair amount of those over the years.”

In addition to Rising, McMurray, who studied Bel Canto opera with the maestro who trained Ann Wilson, Geoff Tate and Layne Staley, played Bruce Dickinson in a band called Maiden Seattle. He began in the tribute world singing and playing bass as Geddy Lee in a Rush-centric band.

He also spent two decades playing bass, keyboards and mandolin in a Led Zeppelin tribute act. “John Paul Jones, as most people know, is the unsung hero of the band. So it was always fun to chill out and do the role that he did,” he said. But the multi-instrumentalist enjoys the spotlight.

“I love being out front as well,” he said. “When I got back into the singing as more of a full-time gig of what I do, then it was like, OK, the bug came back and I’m fine. I love interacting with the crowd, and I love keeping my vocal chops up.”

The upcoming show isn’t a complete revival — the pivot from RivetSkull to Dio is different from their Rising days. “Back when we were doing the tribute, we were trying for a reenactment of the stage show … we built sets,” he said. “This time, it’s just us doing our thing, and then giving a kick-ass night of music.”

Asked for the story behind the band’s moniker, McMurray said guitarist Plog chose RivetSkull. “That was his baby,” he said. “To him, it was … synonymous with metalhead; he always wanted to have a band called that. When we decided to branch off and do the original thing, he said, ‘Hey, what do you think about this name?’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, let’s go for it.’”

Dio Celebration: RivetSkull Performs Ronnie James Dio Classics
When: Saturday, May 3, 8 p.m.
Where: Rock n Roll Meatballs, 179 Elm St., Manchester (formerly Angel City Music Hall)
Tickets: $20 at eventbrite.com

Featured photo. RivetSkull. Photo by Savoia Photography Live.

David Wilcox performs in Manchester

A lot of David Wilcox’s fans consider him a musical minister, his songs providing spiritual grounding as they rhyme and dance.

“If I feel hollow, that’s just proof there’s more for me to follow,” he offers simply in “That’s What the Lonely Is For,” a touchstone track from his mid-’90s gem, Big Horizon.

A fitting way to describe Wilcox’s approach to songwriting is “Language of the Heart,” also a song title from his major label debut, How Did You Find Me Here? In a recent phone interview, he likened his craft to bailing water from a boat. “Because the alternative is death,” he said. “It is purely self-preservation.”

Even if the world isn’t clamoring for another song, “What I need is to check in with my heart so that I stay current with my grieving and it doesn’t build up a backlog or break the dam,” he continued. “It’s a fun excuse; I pretend I’m being an artist, but really I’m just tending to my emotional buoyancy.”

In 2016, Wilcox began helping his fans process their emotions through his music via a bespoke song service. “I’ve kind of applied my songwriting talents to other people’s hearts and stories … that’s a fascinating thing for me,” he said. “I’ve done more than 70 of these custom songs now, and they’re all so specific and unique.”

The process begins with Wilcox spending an hour on the phone talking to a prospect, who is usually looking for a unique gift.

“To see if I can get to the heart of the song, I ask quirky questions, like, ‘What are some things on your shelf that have a story that would really take a while to tell?’ or, ‘What’s a thing you’d reach for if the house was on fire?’”

Testimonials to Wilcox’s Custom Built Songs fill the service’s web page.

“David has a keen ability to take a conversation and turn it into art,” said a customer named Bob, who surprised his wife on their 17th wedding anniversary with a Wilcox-penned ode to the rainforest. “He listened to our story and turned it into a beautiful song that we will enjoy for the rest of our lives.”

Writing in response to stories he’s heard is how, as a young introvert, Wilcox began his musical journey. “Someone would say something to me, and it would take me a day of sort of gathering my answer musically. Then I would come back, and I would sing them a song that showed I was listening. I did feel what you were saying.”

The spirituality in his music is the product of a wide open and still ongoing search for meaning, and words to express it.

“What I got growing up was a mystical sense that life is more interesting than it appears,” he said. “I was trying to find language for that because I was raised with no tradition at all. And that was a great way to come up, because I got my mystical sense first before I had any dogma or any stories.”

It’s not rooted in any specific dogma or belief system.

“I speak a lot of languages spiritually, and I am comfortable in a lot of settings. If people saw me coming out of some buildings, they’d say, ‘What the hell are you doing in there?’ I have prayed at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem,” he said, adding, “The fact that three religions landed in the same city on the same rock, I don’t consider that an accident. I consider that divine comedy.”

Wilcox has made 18 studio albums, starting with the independently released The Nightshift Watchman in 1987. His latest is 2023’s My Good Friends. His creative process is a blend of self-therapy and mysticism. “I call it metabolizing old pain. You take it apart and find that it’s made of discomfort, but mostly it’s … yearning, which has a sacredness. [It] comes from an assumption that life should be better, that you’re basing on … nothing but just faith.”

David Wilcox
When: Friday, April 25, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Dana Center, Saint Anselm College, Manchester
Tickets: $45 at anselm.edu

Featured photo. David Wilcox. Photo by Lynne Harty.

Brewery concert series welcomes folk duo Hildaland

By Michael Witthaus

[email protected]

A wry and oft-repeated maxim at Berklee College of Music is that booking so many gigs that there’s no time for class is a worthy goal, even if it means not graduating. That was fiddler Louise Bichan’s plan when she arrived from Scotland in the mid-2010s, but the connections she made at the Boston school changed her mind.

“I was playing in a band that were kind of doing well and taking off back home when I left for Berklee and I planned to go back and rejoin after a year,” she said in a recent Zoom chat. “It didn’t work out that way; there were so many great people to learn from and to play with … there was so much I wanted to get out of it. So I ended up staying.”

One of the musicians Bichan met was mandolin player Ethan Setiawan. The two became members of Corner House, a four-piece band that formed at Berklee and had their first gig at the 2017 Fresh Grass Festival in the Berkshires. In 2019, they spun off as Hildaland, taking their name from a Scottish folk tale about shape-shifting seals.

Setiawan, during the same Zoom call, said the intimacy of a duo appealed to them. “We can be more improvisational and spontaneous within the framework that we’ve created in these songs and tunes because there’s one line of communication.” A band, on the other hand? “It’s exponential.”

Bichan, a native of Scotland’s Orkney Islands, and Indiana-born Setiawan carry on a lovely musical conversation. In 2019 they recorded an EP, less a debut than an attempt at defining themselves.

“We don’t really sound much like that anymore,” Setiawan said. “It was very experimental … just kind of us playing around.”

Synthesizing those rough beginnings with a few years playing together led to Sule Skerry, an 11-song album that includes reworked traditional tunes like the lovely title track, and uplifting originals. “Silver Dollar,” Bichan’s instrumental tribute to her aunt and uncle’s 25th wedding anniversary, is a standout.

Another gem is Setiawan’s “Weezy & Vera,” with ebullient interplay between the two. There are also covers of Gillian Welch’s “Everything Is Free” and “Fall On My Knees,” a standard that’s been done by Red Clay Ramblers, The Freight Hoppers and others, along with a lush interpretation of the 19th-century Scottish love poem “Ettrick.”

“Our main inspiration comes from my Scottish roots and Ethan’s roots in old-time American and maybe a little bluegrass — and Ethan also is a great jazz musician,” Bichan said. “And the more we’ve worked up new material and played together, the more we’ve refined what our sound is.”

Innovative Celtic harpist and Berklee instructor Maeve Gilchrist was a helpful mentor early on. They worked together in the studio on Corner House’s debut LP.

“Maeve is such a complete musician; we talked about many different aspects of tune writing,” Setiawan said. “She has such a grasp of harmony, and a great sense of playing a melody.”

Hildaland will perform at Blasty Bough Brewing in Epsom on April 18, part of the ongoing Blasty Trad roots music series spearheaded by brewery head Dave Stewart. Bichan performed there a few years back with another band. Surprisingly, she learned about the local series, which began in 2018, while playing overseas.

“David’s daughter Madeline is a great fiddle player; we met in Glasgow, where I used to live,” she said. “We did a live session at BBC Radio Scotland. It was four of us, each in a corner of a big studio; we went around the room and everyone played something. That’s how we met.”

Bichan and Setiawan, who live together in Cornish, Maine, are working on an EP to follow up Sule Skerry.

“It goes back to our tune playing roots,” Setiawan said of the songs, which have developed during their live shows. “That will be coming out later this year. Then we definitely have an eye towards the next sort of full record that will have some more songs and a mix of things.”

Hildaland

When: Friday, April 18, 7 p.m.
Where: Blasty Bough Brewing Co., 3 Griffin Road, Epsom
Tickets: $30 and up at cocoatickets.com

Featured photo. Hildaland. Courtesy photo.

Friends and bandmates to perform tribute show

By Michael Witthaus

[email protected]

The New England music scene suffered a huge loss last October, when Brooks Young was killed in a car accident. The guitarist, singer and songwriter was celebrating a wave of success that included tours with George Thorogood, Sammy Hagar and Three Dog Night, and shows sharing the stage with stars like Bryan Adams and B.B. King.

Young’s career was fueled equally by talent and tenacity.

“If someone called and wanted him for a good gig, he was saying yes,” Mike Liane, a bandmate of Young’s organizing a memorial show in Concord, recalled recently. “He didn’t care, and I say this in a loving way, if the group of people around him were going to be able to do it. He knew he was going to do that gig.”

Occasionally, he’d book a show and learn some members of his band had prior commitments, Liane continued. That didn’t matter; Young would put together a quick pickup group or, failing that, do the show solo. “Brooks wasn’t going to lose an opportunity for anyone … he just had this confidence and bravery. ”

Young was a genre-bending rocker who began in the blues. He met B.B. King in his late teens, after the legendary guitarist performed in Manchester on September 11, 2001. Eight years later Young’s band opened for King in Concord. Over his career Young would range into rock and pop, without losing his early inspiration, Liane recalled.

“The thing that paints an accurate picture in my mind of what he really liked to do is when we’d play ‘Hoochie Coochie Man.’ The reason I say that is because it has very true, deep blues roots, but we’d do it in a way that was muscular and a little rock … he would take all his influences and combine them into every performance.”

The April 13 event at BNH Stage is a fundraiser to benefit Young’s three children. House band performers span the Brooks Young Band’s history, including drummer Blake Wyman, a member of the group’s first incarnation. Three other drummers will be on hand as well: Adam Soucy, Rob McCarthy and Dave Lombard, who was behind the kit longest.

“Usually the hardest band member to find is a good drummer, but in this instance we’ve got four that raised their hand,” Liane said. “But outside of the drummers, the lineup’s pretty consistent. Charles Mitchell’s on bass … there’s myself and Mike Gallant on guitars, and Jeff LeRoy, who played keys with Brooks basically his entire career … a great band.”

Also performing is Charlie Farren, who contributed to Young’s second album. “They had a relationship since then, and we’re delighted that he’s going to play,” Liane said. “He’s going to do a few songs, and hopefully I can get him on stage to sing some harmony with us or something like that during the set with the Brooks Young Band.”

Also appearing are Hank Osborne, Dakota Smart and Valerie Baretto, and there will likely be additional guests.

Liane was a band member late in the game, accompanying him on Three Dog Night and George Thorogood tours from 2016 to 2020, but he’d known Young since high school. He recalls when the two enrolled in an introductory guitar class, even though both were pretty good players at that point.

“We just wanted to play guitar, but we also knew we could get a really good grade,” he recalled. “While everyone else was learning ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’ he would show me a Clapton lick, and then I would show him an Angus Young lick. We did that during class.”

His old friend never lost the joy of being a musician, Liane continued, recalling another memory that happened a lot.

“Every night standing side stage, he’d put his hands on my shoulders right before we walked out and he’d look me right in the eye and he’d say, Mike, we’re going to have a good time tonight,” he said. “Every single time that he did this, and it was hundreds of times, but every single time he did this, he was excited, he had a huge smile on his face, and it’s the only place on Earth he wanted to be in that moment.”

Memorial Concert for Brooks Young

When: Sunday, April 13, 4 p.m.
Where: BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $20 and up at ccanh.com
Appearing are Brooks Young Band, with Charlie Farren, Hank Osborne, Dakota Smart, Mikey G and Valerie Baretto

Featured photo. Brooks Young. Courtesy photo.