Category: Nightlife

Country singer Annie Brobst stays positive

By Michael Witthaus
mwitthaus@hippopress.com

There’s a timeless adage both revered and reviled among songwriters. Essentially, it says that any misery is mitigated if it produces a song. Shawn Colvin once responded to this sentiment with terse words. “I’d rather do anything,” she sang back in 1992, “than write this song for you.”

Annie Brobst can look at it from both sides.

For more than a decade, Brobst has been a big part of the region’s country music scene. The single “Red Wine On Mind,” from 2021’s Where We Holler, netted her latest in a string of New England Music Awards. The album is packed with gems like the popgrass rocker “Little Girl Dreams” and the blues-inflected “On the Record.”

Brobst didn’t set out to be a singer. She found her talents belting out her favorite hits in Boston karaoke bars, and followed her muse after meeting songwriter Roger Hagopian. He encouraged her to channel the elements of her life that resembled a country song into her own music.

Her first song came after a breakup. Brobst had followed her boyfriend from Ohio to Boston, where the romance faded. In response, she wrote “Ghost,” and won her first NEMA. On the other hand, she’d be content with skipping the experience that produced her second drawn-from-life composition, “After the Rain.”

Eighteen months ago, Brobst and her husband and creative partner Ryan Dupont returned from an out-of-town trip to find a burst pipe in their third-floor bathroom. “The place was ruined,” Brobst recalled in a recent phone interview. “We were displaced from our home for about a year.”

Initially, she didn’t feel inspired to write something like When We Holler’s charming “Make Lemonade,” however fitting that might have felt.

“I was just in this mind space,” she said. “I didn’t feel super creative in the time. Once we started to get on the other end of that, I did write a song about that. And then we have a couple more that we wrote and recorded.”

She’ll perform those and others from her debut EP and two albums — the other is My First Rodeo, released in 2018 — when she appears at Lost Cowboy Brewing Co. in Nashua on June 13. It’s one of a few shows Brobst has coming up in New Hampshire, a state she’s played infrequently, though she and Dupont were married in the White Mountains.

On June 28 she’ll headline an early evening show at Stone Church in Newmarket, backed by singer/songwriter Keith Crocker and special guest band Punktry Bumpkins. On July 12 she opens for country rapper Big Murph at The Flying Monkey in Plymouth, and she returns to The Range, a buzzy outdoor venue in Mason, on July 17.

Though the new song was inspired by Brobst’s own tragedy, its message is universal.

“It’s for anyone in that moment of limbo,” she explained. “There’s sun that comes out after the rain; you just can’t quite see it yet. That’s definitely what the song’s about. I think it can apply to so many people and so many situations that they’re just pushing through.”

“After The Rain” and a few others that have been polished in the studio will make their way into a future album.

“Yeah, we’re going to release some singles, and definitely keep writing now that we’re in a better space,” Brobst said. “I definitely always like to have my singles live on an album at some point. That’s kind of always been my M.O. “

Brobst, who’s spent close to 15 years in New England, is resisting the pull of Nashville as her next career move.

“I’m happy here,” she said. “My husband and my stepdaughters are here, so I do have our life rooted…. We’re going to be ourselves, write our music, play our awesome shows out this way, and see if at some point we can’t gain some traction or attention. I don’t see moving in our future anytime soon — not to say we wouldn’t if the opportunity was a great one.”

Annie Brobst

When: Friday, June 13, 7 p.m.
Where: Lost Cowboy Brewing Co., 546 Amherst St., Nashua
More: anniebrobstmusic.com

Also Saturday, June 28, 5:30 p.m. at Stone Church, 5 Granite St., Newmarket ($15 at stonechurchrocks.com)

Featured photo. Annie Brobst. Photo by Liza Czech.

Crowned28 tribute show honors icons

In 2023, when Jordan Quinn did her tribute to generations of great female singers, called “Queens,” it was a one-woman show. She had backing vocalists, but the artists she chose were solo icons: Aretha, Whitney, Cher, Dolly, Gaga and the like. For her latest take on the format, the Manchester performer decided to open up the playing field a bit.

The result is Crowned28, a night of music that includes the aforementioned solo stars but also songs from groups, like the Pointer Sisters, and LaBelle, with its ’70s smash, “Lady Marmalade,” and a version of “I Say a Little Prayer” that, although an Aretha Franklin hit, hints at what Diana Ross & the Supremes might have done with it.

The show is also more theatrical this time around, Quinn explained in a recent phone interview.

“It allows me to blossom and transform into other people, which I really enjoy doing,” she said. “We try to take advantage of that, bring out a side that maybe you wouldn’t see in a typical tribute show with some of these artists.”

The costumes and choreography reflect this, and the milieu also has changed from the last production, which was done for a seated audience at Manchester’s Rex Theatre. This show is cabaret style and will be held in the Angel City Event Space of Rock ‘n Roll Meatballs on Elm Street.

“We are selling more tickets than there are seats, so there will be more standing around,” Quinn said. This will allow the singers to mingle and dance with the crowd, creating a nightclub vibe. Along with Quinn, there are two featured singers, each of whom will have their own spotlight during the show.

Mariah Delage won the Best Voice In Keene competition last year and appeared as a featured dancer in the Actorsingers’ recent production of Legally Blonde. Aysa Carnucci has worked with Palace Youth Theatre, Exeter’s Pine Street Players and the Amato Center’s dance company.

For Quinn, singing together with Delage and Carnucci is Quinn’s is a highlight of Crowned28.

“I really like the ensemble pieces; I love sharing the stage with them,” she said. “‘Lady Marmalade’ is one of my favorites, and the Pointer Sisters’ ‘I’m So Excited’ and then, of course, listening to the other girls sing Cher and Christina Aguilera is just a gift.”

For her solo turns, Quinn enjoys doing Tina Turner’s “Simply the Best,” and her take on Celine Dion covering “All By Myself” while decked out in an all-white suit was a showstopper in “Queens.” The three singers also do a solid version of Linda Ronstadt’s “You’re No Good” and give Heart’s “Barracuda” a terrific three-part harmony that it never had before.

While she continues to perform in the area’s restaurants and bars as a solo artist, Quinn is carving a niche with shows like Crowned28. It’s a pursuit that’s less about enjoying tributes, though watching her convincingly cover Donna Summer or Pat Benatar makes it clear she likes it.

“It’s the fact that it’s mine,” she said. “I grew up in the theater industry, and the whole idea behind creating my own show is because when you go into an audition for a musical theater piece, all you have is 36 bars to sing in front of the director. Then the director and their team decide if you’re right for the part or not. Thirty-six bars is like a minute of singing. In my mind, it’s like I am so much more capable than just 36 bars.”

Shaping a mood and casting an ensemble, which includes a band with drummer Stephen Baberadt, Greg Kieffer on guitar, bass player Jack Lianos and Derek Tanch on keyboards, is more satisfying than just taking part in a show, she continued.

“I feel like I’m able to show all of my capabilities, I think that’s what’s really exciting, because I have found a way to not limit myself,” she said. “There is no one category that everyone belongs in [and] I wanted to create a theatrical piece that everyone can enjoy, but also to showcase that we don’t belong in one category.”

Crowned28 – A Celebration of Iconic Women in Music
When: Thursday, June 5, 8 p.m.
Where: Angel City Event Space/Rock N Roll Meatballs, 179 Elm St., Unit B, Manchester
Tickets: $20 at eventbrite.com

Featured photo. From left to right: Mariah Delage, Jordan Quinn and Aysa Carnucci Courtesy photo.

Faith Ann Band refines sound, adds guitarist

By Michael Witthaus
mwitthaus@hippopress.com

In January, with some new songs done, but not enough for a studio album, the Faith Ann Band chose to put out their first live EP instead. Recorded at the Stone Church in Brattleboro, Vermont, it’s a blistering collection, a solid document of a hard-charging quartet hitting its stride, driven by feral frontwoman Faith Ann Mandravelis’s raw energy.

It kicks off with “Route 2,” its lead-in strum giving way to bashing and growling. With provocative lines like, “your breath on my neck is a whole kinda mood” — a studio version released in March ends with heavy metal vocal jousting — it captures the many vibes convincingly struck by the band on the live record.

There’s a proto-metal cover on Live at VT Stone Church: “The Wizard,” from Black Sabbath’s 1970 debut. The show was on Good Friday 2024, and while the song’s selection wasn’t intentional, one audience member noticed. Faith Ann said in a recent phone interview that included bassist Nate Sanel and drummer Nick Johnson, “This guy rushed right up to us right after we played it. He was like, ‘Black Sabbath on a Good Friday in a church — that’s so metal!’”

A show at Manchester’s Shaskeen Pub on Friday, May 30, will give New Hampshire fans a chance to hear where the band is landing these days — a more collaborative creative process that will be displayed on Say Less, the upcoming follow-up to 2022’s In Bloom.

“It’s definitely a different sound … a bit more poppy, more driving, maybe a little more funky,” Nate Sanel said. “With a different band and a different lineup. Faith is still writing the lyrics and the songs, but now there are three different people contributing overall — and we have a different producer on this album, too.”

Faith Ann said her songwriting these days was removed from the take-no-prisoners stance on In Bloom. Lyrically, that LP was an immediate, often visceral response to leaving corporate life and other complications. At the time, she called it a healing journey and talked about stepping out of the shadows from a toxic relationship.

That’s changed.

“I’m trying to be more whimsical,” she said, adding that the group’s new dynamic is a contributing factor. “Although I’m still bringing songs that I’ve thought of, the band is taking up space now; that’s a cool thing. [Also], we’re concentrating more on the performance, getting people dancing and invested into the set.”

The Shaskeen show will feature the newest member of the group, Eric Shea on lead guitar. While not exactly the same as Spinal Tap’s drum chair, the Faith Ann Band has had its fair share of guitarists over the years. “We’ve talked about that a lot,” Faith Ann agreed. Lately, they’ve carried on as a trio, and are looking forward to the extra power Shea will add.

Sharing the stage in Manchester is Andrew North & the Rangers. Faith Ann admired the Concord band’s efforts to support its local scene, like the monthly open mic it hosts at BNH Stage. “You’re getting the passion and the talent … they’re trying to push it,” she said. “When I think about who’s going to put the effort in to bring a crowd, it’s a good choice; and it’s been a while since we’ve played with them.”

Between their leader’s frequent solo gigs and other shows that are set for the coming months, the group is keeping busy. At the end of June they’ll be on the main stage for this year’s Concord Market Days. They’re also booked for Troutstock 2025 in Montague, Mass., July 25-27, and the Barefoot Festival in Greenfield on Aug. 2.

On June 22 they’re leading an all-day Summer Kick-Off at Auburn Pitts, a show Faith Ann organized.

“Some people just want a day of it, and they don’t want to be committing their whole weekend,” she said of the event, which also has Glitter Tooth, The Whole Loaf, Tumbletoads and Jesse Rutstein. “I’m trying to bring more of the day-fest vibes to the Manchester area, because it’s a bumping city.”

Faith Ann Band w/ Andrew North & the Rangers

When: Friday, May 30, 8 p.m.
Where: Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester
Tickets: $20 at eventbrite.com

Featured photo. Courtesy photo.

Comedy Coop comes to Kettlehead

Like the classic rock song, Joe Fenti has learned to roll with the changes. In 2019 he got his bachelor’s degree and started a consulting job that had him at client sites when he wasn’t in airports. Six months later he was living in Zoom world, as the world shut down, and, he said recently, “we were just trying to figure out what does our workday even look like?”

So he made it funny on social media, creating a fictitious company called Fenti Fried Chicken to skewer corporate life, its Patagonia-vested bros, and guys like Brandon the Intern who responds to demands for Excel reports with, “Sure thing, is Excel the green one?”

It was a pivot from Fenti’s college days, when he thought memes were the best path to comedy success.

“I noticed that the joke wasn’t about something, the joke just became what the joke is. It would be a reference to something that no one had ever heard of but if you got it you knew what it was,” he said. “Humor evolves.”

Fenti’s quick-hit reels built his profile, as did his takes on other topics. His pitch-perfect “Yes, Chef!” impression of The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White got 12 million hits. As the world opened back up, though, he moved from content creation to stand-up comedy. Three years later he’s doing it full time and preparing his first national tour.

His online disposition is still on display, but he’s not trying to translate his TikTok and Instagram humor for a crowd.

“The jokes you can make on stage can be a little more fleshed out, you can build … a story; on the internet you have to be very relatable very fast,” he said. “To work it has to be, ‘Who would I send this to?’ or ‘Who is someone I think of when I see this video?’ With stand-up, I can … bring you into my life rather than trying to make stuff for everyone.”

He’ll still touch on life in the business world.

“Return to office or hybrid work culture, there’s always something for me to riff on because I did experience that,” he said. “But now it’s more like, ‘Here are things that have happened to me … things I’m noticing about being a 28-year-old guy now living with my girlfriend for the first time.”

With hundreds of clips, his online life does pop up. He’ll talk about being recognized as a web celebrity, noting that men often can’t say why his face is familiar. “I’m a stand-up comic,” he’ll explain, only to hear in reply that’s not it, nor is his content. So he’ll say something like, maybe you know me from my job as an actor — in court-ordered training videos.

Building on his stand-up success, Fenti began booking shows under the name Comedy Coop, chosen to reflect his Fenti Fried Chicken social media handle. He’ll be at Kettlehead Brewing in Nashua on May 22, celebrating the opening of Za Dude Pizza there, along with Boston Comedy Fest winner Liam McGurk, Troy Burditt, Ryan Ellington and El Kennedy.

Fenti promises a well-balanced showcase.

“I try to book a lot of different comedians so you’re not getting five Joe Fentis,” he said. “You’re getting someone who does one-liners, someone who does storytelling, someone who likes joking about parenthood or teaching or whatever. I’m trying to give a whole show.”

Fenti’s own comedy is inspired by absurdists like Steven Wright and Mitch Hedberg. He has a recurring series of videos with him in sunglasses delivering his own jokes in Hedberg’s style that are hilarious. “If I’m ever in a room, and I don’t want people to talk to me, I pretend to be an elephant,” he says with the late comic’s deadpan delivery.

“I just love comics who do things that are a little weird and a little different,” Fenti continued, citing Demitri Martin and Bo Burnham as other guiding lights.

“People who can tell a story so smoothly and bring weird life moments to the stage,” he said. “I look to Mitch in so many ways. How he perceived the world, like an escalator is never broken, they just become stairs, that’s such a funny way to look at it [and] I try to bring that to a lot of the jokes I write now, and put them into my style. Which is still evolving; I’ve only been doing comedy almost three years. There’s always room to try new things and see what works.”

Joe Fenti w/ Liam McGurk, Troy Burditt, Ryan Ellington and El Kennedy
When: Thursday, May 22, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Kettlehead Brewing Co., 97 Main St., Nashua
Tickets: $20 at eventbrite.com

Featured photo. Joe Fenti. Courtesy photo.

Ward Hayden & the Outliers bring Springsteen tribute to Pembroke

By Michael Witthaus

mwitthaus@hippopress.com

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.