Category: Nightlife

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.

Festival mixes music, yoga and art

An impromptu party a couple of summers ago is the impetus for a two-day event blending live music, movement, camping, inclusion and environmental responsibility. The Barefoot Music & Arts Festival happens at a yoga center in the woods of Hillsboro that’s popular for healing retreats and farm-to-table community dinners. It’s not the first place that comes to mind for a mini-Woodstock, and that’s part of the inspiration.

The Evocatives, an eclectic, electric reggae sextet, played an evening show at Bethel Farm Yoga and Living Art Center that was closed out with a DJ set by the son of farm owner Steve Bethel. The vibe was infectious, as revelers danced late into the night.

“It put a little bug in our brains,” Evocatives singer Jennifer Bakalar said by phone recently. “Maybe we want to turn this into something that we could do again … share it with more people.”

Fifteen performers are booked to perform over two nights, but this is no simple rock show, Bakalar said.

“We really wanted to have a clear intention, so we decided on two founding principles,” she said. “Whatever we did needed to live up to the names ‘Leave No Trace’ and ‘Radical Inclusion.’”

The first principle is easy to understand and is detailed in a National Park Service article linked on the festival website. The second is less concrete. “It’s just about being the kind of human that you’d want to run into at a festival,” Bakalar said, “and a willingness to tolerate ambiguity or open-endedness. Maybe not necessarily understand but be OK with it.”

It begins with a varied musical lineup that includes singer-songwriters Tyler Allgood, Caylin Costello, Jon Stephens and Ian Galipeau doing sets, Cajun and zydeco dance music from Bayou X, led by New Orleans native Peter Simoneaux, along with the jammy Modern Fools. Electronica duo Deep Seize blends hand pans with hip-hop and funky grooves; psychedelic folk band Party of the Sun and indie rockers Hug the Dog are some of the other acts.

In addition to leading his eponymous jazz trio, Ben Jennings will help in a community kitchen. “We expect people to bring a lot of their own food because they’re camping,” Bakalar said, “but we also want to offer something for the crew and the volunteers, and for people that might not have packed enough. He has a great chili recipe, so he’s going to do a huge batch.”

Such collective spirit is the underlying ethos of the festival. All musicians are donating their time, but any profits beyond production costs will be split.

“Anyone who had a stake, who was really invested and involved” will share, Bakalar said, adding, “it’s been amazing how things have kind of fallen into place; any time there’s been a real significant need, someone has stepped up and found a way for us to fill it.”

When onstage performances are over, the festival crowd will provide the music.

“We have a drum circle planned around a fire,” Bakalar said. “Bring your drums, sit around the fire, and drum until it’s time for bed.”

There’s plenty beyond music; everyone is encouraged to participate.

“It’s going to be whatever people make it to be,” Bakalar said. “If you don’t try a class or… explore the art, you’re only going to have a limited experience of the festival.”

Bakalar is an art teacher and enjoys giving her brethren a platform.

“I don’t think they get that opportunity often enough in a way that really does them justice,” she said. “We have two visual artists that are coming to do an installation and make their work on site, [and] we have a vendor village full of artists making things and selling things that they’ve made, artwork, face painting, temporary tattoo, artwork, that kind of stuff.”

The living arts aspect is particularly unique. “Yoga, breathwork classes, movement workshops, self-massage, things that I’ve never even tried I’m really excited about,” Bakalar said, adding that all yoga classes are complimentary. “Really, if you were a yoga fan, coming for all the free workshops that we’re offering would be well worth the value of the ticket.”

When attendees leave their tidy campsites, carrying anything non-recyclable in a compostable trash bag provided by the festival organizers, Bakalar wants no one to feel exhausted.

“It’s a festival where you’re not walking away from it feeling like you need a few days to recover before you can go back to work; it’ll feel inspiring and rejuvenating and creative,” she said. “It’s not just a crazy music festival. It’s about community and really building something that’s sustainable that we could do again and keep doing in years to come.”

Barefoot Music & Arts Festival
When: Friday, Aug. 4, at 5 p.m. through Saturday Aug 5, at 10 p.m.
Where: Bethel Farm & Yoga Studio, 34 Bethel Road, Hillsboro
Tickets: Two-day passes $90.57, Friday only $43.61, Saturday only $54.92 at theticketing.co

Friday lineup:
Tyler Allgood
Caylin Costello
Lord Magnolia
Bayou X
Superbug
Evocatives
Saturday lineup:
Jon Stephens
Ian Galipeau
Party of the Sun
Deep Seize
Modern Fools
The Ben Jennings Trio
Evocatives
Hug the Dog
DJ Flex

Featured photo: Evocatives. Courtesy photo.

Bands, booking and community building

For many musicians, having space in life to create and stages to play on is the measure of success. While stream counts and ticket sales are fine for rock ’n’ roll fantasy, a Friday night in front of a supportive group of fans and friends is a dream that might actually come true — but it won’t happen alone.

That’s the idea driving Always Forward, a promotion effort led by Sam Beachard, who’s also a singer for Manchester nu-metal band House Lights. Beachard has been part of the local music scene since Rocko’s Bar & Grill regularly presented shows in the early aughts, along with the Sad Café in Plaistow. Between those and spots like Milly’s (now Stark Brewing), he and his college friend Mathew Laramie’s band Horns Become Haloes always had a place to play.

Sad Café and Rocko’s have been gone for nearly a decade and getting from the basement to the big stage is a bigger challenge. Beachard aims to change that.

“I want to build a community within the music scene of New England,” Beachard said by phone recently, adding that indie bands face an uphill battle. “A lot of times they don’t bring the crowd, but even ones that do, a lot of promoters and venues won’t work with them because they don’t have name recognition. They’re not willing to give them a chance.”

Incorporated in late 2022, Always Forward has done five shows already, with four more planned in the coming months. A typical bill is composed of an out-of-town act surrounded by a few local performers. On July 29 at The Strand in Dover, rambunctious Albany, New York, punk rockers The Snorts appear, along with Oziem, a Manchester band equally inspired by Social Distortion and the Misfits. Rounding out the undercard is Lovewell, described by Beachard as “emo alt rock indie that’s good for fans of Death Cab.”

The Jerritones, a Newmarket duo that’s fond of fuzzy guitars and oddball costumes, will headline. “I liken them to early Weezer with elements of the Hives … irreverent silly lyrics, with fuzzy guitars and catchy melodies,” Beachard said. “I tell people it’s something you probably weren’t expecting, but it will put a smile on your face and have you reevaluating a bit of your musical taste.”

The following weekend in Concord’s at Penuche’s Ale House, New Jersey’s Bobby Mahoney & the Seventh Son appear. Beachard calls them “an Americana punk band … very much like John Mellencamp or Bruce Springsteen’s style.” Local support will come from Wired for Sound and Sauce on the Side.

Soon, Beachard’s own band will appear, in support of a new album that’s been a long time coming.

House Lights, which also includes Adam Soucy on drums and bassist Bobby Spence, rose from the ashes of Horns Become Haloes. In 2014, the group made a “Seven Stages of Grief”-themed EP, then scattered. “It was more a getting-back-on-the-horse moment,” Beachard said of making the record. “For us to kind of prove … we can work together, we’ve done a little bit of growing up here, we can be mature about this. But we all kind of had our own thing.”

Laramie and Beachard pivoted to career and family, Spence had a myriad of projects, and Soucy left to study at Berklee. One day in the depths of the pandemic, Laramie reached out to his college friend and former bandmate to share the material he’d built up in the intervening years. “He and I have always worked well together, our styles just blend very well,” Beachard said. “I love the music he writes; it resonates with me emotionally. So it’s easy for me to write lyrics to it that I can fully get behind and I’m proud of.”

What It Means to Feel is set for release Sept. 1, followed by a series of live shows. The first single, “Love and Understanding,” came out July 21. A Beachard lyric could be read as a mission statement for his promotion effort. “You’re not alone in this battle you’re fighting,” he sings. “I’m beside you, still fighting.”

Regarding Always Forward, Beachard stresses that the community he aims to foster needs support from everyone, not just musicians.

“Find one or two bands,” he said, “and make it a point to get out to their shows regularly. That’s what keeps us doing what we do; that’s what makes it worth it, even if it’s not financially. Musicians are stubborn as hell and don’t know when to quit. We’re going to do it, but we need mental support too.”

The Jerritones, Oziem, The Snorts & Lovewell
When: Saturday, July 29, 7 p.m.
Where: The Strand, 20 Third St., Dover
Tickets: $12 at eventbrite.com

Wired for Sound, Bobby Mahoney & the Seventh Son, Sauce on the Side
When: Friday, Aug. 4, 9 p.m.
Where: Penuche’s Ale House, 16 Bicentennial Square, Concord
Tickets: $5 at the door

Featured photo: The Jerritones. Courtesy photo.

Young Dubliners perform in Concord

It’s been 35 years since the Young Dubliners debuted. With rocked-up songs that owed as much to Thin Lizzy as any trad band with a fiddle and bodhran, they were the West Coast counterparts to New York City’s Black 47.

“At the time, the term ‘Celtic rock’ didn’t exist,” band founder Keith Roberts said in a recent phone interview. “It was just … blending Irish music with other forms of music.”

Roberts, the last original member, seems bemused by his band’s longevity.

“The name tells you right away I didn’t plan it,” he said. “There’s no way when I was 22 that I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, Young Dubliners. That’s really gonna work when I’m 58.’ But it is what it is; I’m stuck with it. So, I have to pretend to be the Peter Pan of Celtic rock.”

The singer, songwriter and guitarist originally moved from Ireland to L.A. to chase a career in journalism. He buttressed an interesting but low-paying job doing research for NPR with odd jobs like driving an airport shuttle, which led to sound work on movie sets. One day, he bought an Irish bar in Santa Monica, mainly so the band he’d started could escape the pay-to-play gigs then dominating SoCal.

“I’d never intended on going on the road, I just wanted to own the pub and be the band on Saturday night,” he said. Weekend shows consisted of a headliner, the Young Dubliners and a band that later became Flogging Molly. “We got signed first and a year later they got signed, then Gaelic Storm…. It’s an interesting, fluky chain of events.”

They’ve solidified into a standard-bearer for the genre, playing all over the world, topping the bill on cruises, and every 18 months or so heading back to Ireland with over 100 Americans in tow. When Roberts was first approached with the idea of touring with a group of fans, “I couldn’t think of anything worse,” he recalled. “I eventually said, ‘Look, if I do this, I want it to be a normal tour.’”

So a plan was hatched that offers a balance of sightseeing and shows like an unplugged hotel lobby gig and a concert in a castle, with a sleepover.

“The Americans will have two days to just enjoy it like they are in Downton Abbey or something,” Roberts said, laughing. “Nobody wants to go to Ireland and see us play every single night…. This isn’t the Bruce Springsteen farewell tour. They’ve already seen us in America; they want to come and see Ireland with us.”

The Young Dubliners have made nine records and are close to finishing their 10th. The new album doesn’t have a title, but it’s shaping into an introspective effort. “Drive” was inspired by Roberts’ worry that he might not perform again, a thought shared by many musicians as the pandemic stretched on.

“My lyrics are all over the place and they definitely represent a lot of what happened,” he said. “We all sort of reinvented ourselves with skills we never knew we had during Covid, building furniture, making bread; I turned an old band trailer into a camper. The song is sort of uplifting about what would happen [and it] resonates now playing it to an audience.”

Another new song, “Look to the Stars,” pays homage to one of Roberts’ primary influences. “It’s absolutely got the Big Country riffs at the beginning, and I love them. They were probably the biggest — them and the Waterboys’ Fisherman’s Blues were probably what really pushed me out of just being a straight rock band and embracing the Irish stuff.”

Their current concert is a mix of old and new that begins with “a historical musical journey of the Young Dubs and how we wrote all our own stuff along the way,” Roberts said, followed by a portion “dedicated to the Irish Sessions album, where we did all the covers.” That trad-rich album included the bracing “Rocky Road to Dublin” and a lilting take of the Pogues’ “Pair of Brown Eyes.”

From there the music moves emphatically forward, Roberts continued. “If you only stay for the first half of the show, you’re going to miss out on a whole other part of our life,” he said. “I was joking about it the other day, saying if I was doing a farewell tour, this would probably be a pretty close set to what we would do.”

Young Dubliners w/ Rebel Collective
When: Sunday, July 23, 8 p.m.
Where: Bank of NH Stage, 44 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $35.75 at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Young Dubliners. Courtesy photo.