Category: Nightlife

Singer-songwriter John Gorka performs in Manchester

Even if he’s performed since the late 1970s, winning the prestigious Kerrville New Folk Award in 1984 and coming up in the Greenwich Village Fast Folk Scene during that decade, John Gorka still feels a touch of nervousness every time he walks on stage.

“The only time I don’t … is if I’ve done a bunch of shows in a row and I’m too tired to be nervous,” Gorka said in a Zoom interview from his home in Minnesota. It means it still matters, he added. “Frank Sinatra said something about having nerves, he said that’s just a sign that you care.”

He’s still working the muscle he began to hone when the late Jack Hardy told him in 1979 that success comes from a schedule. “I told him, ‘I basically wait for inspiration to strike,’ and he said, ‘that’s a copout — you’ll come up with more songs quicker if you put the time in, even if you throw out three quarters of what you come up with.’”

On “Favorite Place,” a song that leads off his most recent album unentitled, Gorka mused on a process that’s “still mysterious and still calls me.” It’s about the joy he finds in the middle of writing, when he knows it’s going to be a song and it’s just a matter of getting all the details right. Throughout, Hardy’s admonition echoes.

“Hope follows action … you start out with showing up and going to work,” he said. “Hopefully, during the working on stuff, a spark of inspiration will come along that’ll fuel you for the rest of the time. These days, despair is not an option, so I’ve got to do something … then the hope will come.”

Gorka deftly manifests that feeling on a standout track from unentitled called “Particle & Wave.”

The song came in response to the 2018 March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C.

“Watching the coverage on CNN, a still small voice in my head said, ‘never stop believing there’s goodness in the world,’” Gorka recalled. “It was like, ‘OK, that sounds like the language of a song.’”

With lines like “Though justice seems to hesitate / It’s not too late,” he introduces it at concerts with a background story. More often, though, Gorka prefers to let audiences infer the meaning of his songs. Sometimes he’s surprised, like the time a woman told him “I Saw a Stranger With Your Hair” reminded her of a son she’d lost.

“I’d thought of it mainly as a romantic song, but that’s the way it hit her, and that’s why it meant something to her,” he said. “People will figure out what the song is about to them … you don’t want to put blinders on the listener by describing what it’s about too much or where it came from.”

The new record, his 10th for Red House Records, is Gorka’s first release in seven years, with some songs that date even further back.

“There were some things from a while ago that I started to record but never finished, some were new and some were old,” he said. “It was over a fairly long period of time.”

He hosts virtual songwriting workshops multiple times a year with Eliza Gilkyson — the next is in October — and one piece of advice he shares is that modest ambitions are best. “So you’re not trying to write a song for all mankind,” he said. “Set some limits and then work within those limits — and there’s an infinity even within those.”

Hardy and the habit of writing as a bedrock guide him.

“Clear a physical space, as well as your mind, then monitor the thoughts and images coming through,” he said. “For me, morning brain is the most productive. Before going to bed, that’s also a good time — because the song will keep playing through the day.”

As he sings on another great song from unentitled, “Stay until the night’s gone / Stay till you can dream again.”

John Gorka
When: Saturday, Aug. 29, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $40 at palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: John Gorka. Photo by Robert Hakalski.

Wildflower Festival returns with a louder sound and a bigger garden

When Griff Comtois and two friends threw the first Wildflower Festival in 2023, it was three bands and a few dozen art vendors packed around the amphitheater at Milford’s Keyes Memorial Park. Four years later, the environmentally centered event is established enough that Comtois barely recalls the scramble of those early days.

“It feels a lot easier,” he said recently. “People know about us now, so that’s generally good.”

The fourth annual Wildflower Festival returns to Keyes Field Stage on Saturday, Aug. 22, running from noon to 9 p.m. This year brings a notable shift in sound, more art vendors and new education partners, and, for the first time, bands on the bill will be paid for their performances.

Every act this year hails from Massachusetts or New Hampshire, with a musical shift from the more folk- and jam-oriented acts of 2025, like headliner Nova One, toward punk, indie and shoegaze.

“There’s still some folk going on, but we switched styles a little bit,” Comtois said.

“We’ve all kind of just been really into this type of music lately, a lot more punk stuff,” he continued. “It kind of felt natural for us to gather all of our friends and the people we know within the area that play music, instead of trying to find a big name to get a draw.”

7-11 Jesus headlines, with Gollylagging, Tysk Tysk Tysk (replacing originally booked Main Era), Capo / Regime, Parachute Club, Cozy Throne, Thoughtsick, Time Eater, Milk Street, Five Feet and Star Family Singers. Returning for a third appearance is Darth Brandon; its frontman Andrew West, books much of the festival’s music.

The Wildflower Fest art market keeps growing as well. There are 60 vendors this year, up from roughly 50 in 2025. Comtois said organizers are intentionally keeping the number in that range. “It’s a good sweet spot for the amount of vendors to the amount of shoppers we have,” he said.

Expect the usual mix of stickers, prints, original paintings, brass sculptures, pottery, woodworking and crocheted items, plus what Comtois described as a strong showing of plant-inspired art and upcycled clothing this year.

“I always like to see them because I just feel like they fit the vibe of the festival,” he said.

New for 2026 is a slate of education-focused exhibitors. The Caterpillar Lab is bringing live caterpillars and butterflies for hands-on demonstrations, New Hampshire Audubon will have a table, and Queerlective is setting up a pressed-flower button-making station.

Partners underscore the festival’s growth as well, with Triangle Credit Union, Bangor Savings Bank and Fieldstone signing on this year.

“That’s a really nice part,” Comtois said. “Now that we’re more known as a running institution, it’s easier to get sponsors by showing them the things that we’ve done in the past.”

The festival’s original mission of funding pollinator habitat at Keyes Field keeps expanding. A bed of packed dirt in year one, the gazebo garden is now well established, though a few spots are still finding their footing. The meadow strip added last year has taken off: plugs once the size of a fist are now 5 to 6 feet tall and 2 to 3 feet wide.

This spring the group planted a redbud tree and a chokeberry, with more trees planned for fall. Groundbreaking for a planting area near the park’s volleyball courts also began recently.

“That will be cool,” Comtois said. “I think we’re going to get some plants that are 10 to 12 feet tall for that.”

Though national debates about sustainability are a concern, the festival’s ambitions will stay local for now — with an eye toward the future.

“My dream is for us to have more of a national impact,” Comtois said. “A lot of rhetoric and policies are going around now that are not good for us or the environment. I’d like to change that mindset.”

Wildflower Festival
When: Saturday, Aug. 22, noon to 9 p.m.
Where: Keyes Field Stage, Keyes Park, 45 Elm St., Milford
Tickets: Sliding scale (suggested donation $10), eventbrite.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Mountain Grass Unit brings acoustic brilliance to The Range

On Aug. 26, Mountain Grass Unit will make its Grand Ole Opry debut. The next night, they’ll do a release show at Brooklyn Bowl Nashville for Appalachian Smoke, their first for Dualtone Records. At midnight it arrives everywhere else. Three enormous nights, back to back, in the city that the Alabama-born bluegrass band now calls home.

It’s crazy, considering that not long ago Mountain Grass Unit had to work around its members’ college schedules.

They were spread across the country and played together sporadically. Guitarist Luke Black headed to Boston to study at Berklee, while mandolinist Drury Anderson, who’d eventually join him there, was still finishing high school. Bassist Sam Wilson was at the University of Alabama studying accounting. Fiddler Josiah Nelson wasn’t even in the band yet.

What held it together, Black said in a recent group Zoom chat, wasn’t scheduling — it was history.

“We’ve known each other forever, and we’ve been playing together forever, so we’d get a couple of rehearsals in and just feel out the groove,” he said. Though challenging, “It always ended up working out, but it was a lot of pressure, especially keeping up with emails and stuff.”

Anderson said the uncertainty was real, even if it seems easy to gloss over now.

“We got management and representation around halfway through school,” he said. “It was so relieving to have things set up once we got out. It could not have been timed more perfectly.”

Becoming full-time coincided with relocating to Nashville from Alabama, and the move has been fruitful.

“It’s kind of a second hometown,” Anderson said. Having Music City as home base makes the Opry show truly special. The only thing topping it is the way they learned the show was happening.

Del McCoury, a hero of the band, announced it from the stage at DelFest. The moment came after the bluegrass legend and his son Ronnie sat in with them. Before they began, he’d told them, “When y’all end, don’t go anywhere.” Anderson called it “every bit of an electric moment as you could think.”

Another big fan is Billy Strings, who’s praised Black’s flat-picking talents on social media after they won an IBMA award for early-career excellence. “Kinda rude of him to be this good honestly; luckily for me, we’re on the same team,” Strings wrote on Saving Country Music’s Instagram account.

Strings and MGU have jammed together, and he and Black are texting buddies.

“I chat with him every once in a while,” he said. “Mostly it’s just jokes and stuff, and then I’ll get a random text from him that’s like, ‘Hey, man, you wanna come jam?’ I’m like, ‘Shoot, I’m in freaking Idaho, and Billy Strings is asking me to jam in Nashville. I gotta get home.’”

The new album is the band’s most ambitious, using a range of instruments for the first time. For the release show, they’ll reproduce everything done in the studio.

“We’ve reached out to a bunch of our buddies to come help us really play it live,” Wilson said. That includes an electric sitar and bongos on “Eagle’s Nest,” perhaps the most rocked up song they’ve done.

That track started as a stray riff Black had been sitting on for years.

“We’ve been trying to find what to do with it forever,” he said. “When we got to the studio, we just kept adding more and more cool elements to it. It’s an art project.” Elsewhere, the songwriting turns more inward.

“Wait for Me” was born during Wilson’s days shuttling between accounting exams and gigs.

“I’d play shows and festivals all weekend, then fly back and go to the library to study for my test the next morning,” he recalled. The song, he said, was a culmination of a lot of things, including the strain of keeping relationships intact while constantly leaving town.

The album itself was tracked almost entirely live, no metronome. They did full takes, three or four per song, then vocals, with no clicking and dragging parts around afterward.

“It was way more organic,” Black said. “I loved it.” That looseness extended to working with producer Vance Powell and having a real label budget for the first time.

This was in sharp contrast to their 2022 debut, which was made entirely on their own dime. Back then, Wilson said, they didn’t even have a bank account. Gratefully, Dualtone mostly stayed out of the way while they worked.

“We just got in there, played our bluegrass licks, and called it a day,” Black remembered.

Through all of it, the band keeps coming back to the same idea: none of this is supposed to feel heavy.

“Our goal at most of our shows is to create an atmosphere of a good time where you don’t have to worry about everything going on in the world,” Wilson said. “Have a beer, party, and play some train songs. We’re goofy, you can be goofy. Come and hang.”

Mountain Grass Unit
When: Friday, Aug. 15, 7 p.m.
Where: The Range, 96 Old Turnpike Road, Mason
Tickets: $42, etix.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Senie Hunt plays through pain before surgery

Well-known for getting a lot from his guitar, by picking and strumming while also tapping out djembe-like rhythms on its surface, around a year and a half ago Senie Hunt learned his instrument was taking its own toll. As Hunt held a bag of groceries in his left hand, he reached for the doorknob with his right, and felt a sharp, wrist-to-elbow pain.

“I couldn’t even open my door,” he recalled. “I had to use my left hand.”

The source was an old injury, likely dating back to his college rugby and football days, aggravated for years by the demands of his playing. Tissue had been tearing and self-repairing, building up scar tissue that doctors now need to remove and seal back into place.

“It was either that or let it develop into chronic arthritis,” Hunt said. “I’d rather lose a little bit of motion and not have pain than not lose motion and have pain.”

The surgery will happen in Nashville, Hunt’s home for the past five years, right after he does a run of local shows. That means the guitarist is, for now, playing through it, shortening sets and adding breaks as needed. A recent gig finished with his hand wrapped in gauze.

“I just had to play a little differently through certain songs that were maybe a little less percussive,” he said. “The pain leveled down and helped me keep doing all the shows without having to cancel one because of it.”

There’s no paid time off for it, either. “I have insurance, but I can’t give myself that,” Hunt said. “So I recoup — I try to save as much as I can, especially during the tours, like any musician finds ways to.”

That makes this month’s homecoming swing, which ends Aug. 22 at Concord’s Barley House, something like a last stand before he heads South. His trio includes drummer Rory Walsh and bassist Tom Martin, who he’s built a tight chemistry with, and he’ll play several shows solo.

One big night is Aug. 14, when his trio is at the Concord basement bar where he often played before leaving New Hampshire to build a career in Music City.

“Penuche’s is one of those spots where anytime I come back, it’s like home for me,” he said. “It’s the family crowd, everyone we know.”

Hunt is plugged in for the trio shows, playing a Fender Stratocaster he repainted himself in the colors of the flag of Sierra Leone, the country he emigrated from as a young child before settling in New Hampshire.

“I wanted to pay homage to that in any way I could,” he said.

Surgery will align with another milestone for Hunt. He recently finished mixing and mastering his first full-length album, tentatively called The Journey. It’s been in the works since before the pandemic, and the plan is to release it during his recovery, to fill the gap in live shows.

Its title is a reflection of Hunt’s path in leaving his war-torn home country for the U.S., and his life in music.

“The songs try to tell a story of that,” he said. They include a reworked version of “Songbird,” one of the first songs he ever released, that now leans harder into the percussive, West African side of his playing. There’s also “Farewell, New Hampshire,” written when he first left for Nashville.

His new home has been good to him, Hunt said, primarily because he did his homework ahead of moving there.

“It could be a total train wreck if you’re trying to just jump in,” he said, adding he’s found a community beyond the country-leaning masses on the mile-long stretch of Broadway. “You’ve got hip-hop, hardcore metal, blues, jazz … I think the town is slowly starting to recognize all the other scenes.”

One thing missing from the current swing is the Concord Multicultural Festival. Hunt has played it multiple times, but surgery scheduling and September shows with his band back in Nashville mean he’ll bow out from this one. “I really had to focus on planning around my hand surgery this year,” he said.

He won’t have to miss out on seeing family. Nieces, nephews, his brother and sister-in-law, an older sister visiting from Massachusetts, and his twin sister are all in town during what’s also the family’s birthday month.

“Family first,” Hunt said. “Then, boom, all these friends from the years come out to the shows to hang out.”

Senie Hunt Trio at First Fridays: Dog Days of Summer
When: Friday, Aug. 7, at 6:15 p.m.
Where: Bicentennial Square, Concord
More: seniehunt.com
Solo in Concord at Rollins Park (33 Bow St.) on Saturday, Aug. 8, at 10 a.m. and at Sunfox Farm (Gully Hill Road) on Sunday, Aug. 9, at 5:45 p.m. Senie Hunt Trio at Penuche’s (Bicentennial Square) on Friday, Aug. 14, at 9 p.m. (21+)

Featured photo: Senie Hunt. Courtesy photo.

Aaron Berg brings his take-no-prisoners act to Moka Pot

Watching Aaron Berg walk on stage at a comedy club, two thoughts compete for space in one’s head at the same time: he’s either going to make people laugh or totally destroy them. The truth, as Berg tells it, is that he’d really like to do both, metaphorically speaking.

The second thought makes sense because Berg is a competitive bodybuilder, who created his physique the way he builds a set — obsessively, with no shortcuts. He looks less like a comedian than something that wandered off a movie poster, thick-necked, broad-shouldered, all traps and forearms. Along with punchlines, he probably has a deadly right hook.

“I wanted to murder these people,” he said by phone recently, hearkening back on the mentality he brought with him from bodybuilding in his 20s to the comedy stage. “I wanted these people to laugh so hard they were crying. There’s definitely a kill-or-be-killed mentality up there; that does come from bodybuilding.”

Physical conditioning is the throughline in Berg’s career these days, on stage and off. He recently returned to competition, and talks openly now about training, TRT, and the discipline of prepping for competition. His days start at 4:30 a.m. with a quick posing practice, 45 minutes of cardio, a training session, followed by six or seven meals during the day.

“I go all the way in on everything,” he said.

Subject matter that would have seemed like a novelty act a decade ago now resonates with an audience increasingly fluent in peptides and gym culture. Fans now show up specifically for the gym material, then stick around for the rest. Berg keeps busy, doing roughly 20 stand-up sets a week around New York City.

That all-in ethic extends to Berg’s family.

He and his wife, comic Christine Berg, are raising an 8-year-old daughter, Piper, who is now a black belt in taekwondo and, apparently, a fairly sharp critic of his material. “She’ll come to a set, and she’ll go, ‘Dad, that was really offensive,’” Berg said. “And I go, ‘Yeah, but the audience was laughing.’ And she’s like, ‘It doesn’t change the fact it was offensive.’”

Christine chimed in partway through the conversation with her own assessment. Her husband, she said, is “very odd, but very lovable,” and added that there’s no malice behind his material, however far it pushes.

“I’m a very kind person that says horrible things,” Berg said, agreeing with her.

That balance between provocation and warmth is something Berg has had to recalibrate over the years. Roughly a decade ago, around the time he wrote his second book, American Etiquette, he found himself drifting toward overtly political material and a podcast built around it — an effort he now describes as a “grift” that curdled.

“The dog-whistle mentality would allow for fans to basically embrace it just for the purpose of, ‘Oh, they’re saying racial stuff,’ which would then turn into racist stuff,” he said. He walked away, though he did worry about supporting his family. He found assurance from comic friends who insisted he’d land on his feet.

He did. These days the material comes from a more current, more personal place — marriage, fatherhood, and his return to bodybuilding. However, Berg’s stated goal hasn’t changed.

“I want 99 percent of people to love what I do, and I want one percent to be like, what the hell is this?” he said. “And I accomplish that.”

It’s a needle he’s still actively threading on stage, not a settled formula, he continued, and the difference between an edgy joke landing and just being mean is something he checks himself on set to set. The stories he tells trace back to an instinct he found in childhood, that comedy is both a weapon and refuge.

Berg’s best-known feat remains 25 Sets, the 2015 documentary chronicling his attempt to break the record for most stand-up sets performed in a single night. The plan was to hit 26 clubs across New York City, but a car breakdown forced him onto foot and into cabs and cost him a set in Times Square. It left him with 25, still a record, and a title for his movie.

He’s about to make his first appearance in Manchester, at the Moka Pot. Fittingly for the all-or-nothing comic, it’s a two-night run. Berg is learning more about the city and the newly relocated venue, which has several summer shows booked.

“I know the Moka Pot is supposed to be a great little spot for comedy, and there’s a thriving local scene there,” he said. “Everybody seems so excited, but I have no idea where it is. I don’t even know how far the drive is going to be — or if I need to fly or take a small boat.”

Aaron Berg
When: Friday, July 31, and Saturday, Aug. 1, at 8 p.m.
Where: Moka Pot, 8 Hanover St., Manchester
Tickets: $25, eventbrite.com

Featured photo: Aaron Berg. Photo by David Genik.

Dwight & Nicole salute their Kings & Queens at Tupelo

When talking with Dwight & Nicole, there’s a fine line between an interview and eavesdropping.

The married couple, who’ve performed together for more than 20 years, first bonded over a love of traditional blues music, and that’s clearly endured. Answers to questions frequently veer off into discussions between the two, on subjects like whose version of “Ain’t Nobody’s Business” is the best (both agree on Jimmy Witherspoon’s).

It happens so naturally that it’s easy to wonder if their home in Burlington, Vermont, is this way every night — charming banter about clubs played back in the day, how Dwight once nearly booked a show on the Cape with Honeyboy Edwards, the night Nicole saw him open for Otis Rush at the original House of Blues in Cambridge and became instantly smitten.

The answer, it turns out, is yes.

“This is what we do all the time,” Nicole Nelson said as Dwight Ritscher laughed along.

That’s the spirit driving Kings and Queens, a tribute show to a galaxy of influences that the two will bring to Tupelo Music Hall on July 24. The night is built entirely from the songs and singers who first pulled them into blues clubs as teenagers and who, years later, pulled them into each other’s orbit.

The idea had been percolating for years, rooted in a scene the duo watched flourish and eventually fade.

“Both of us came up almost entirely out of the blues scene, which was such a vibrant, thriving thing 20 years ago,” Nelson said, rattling off the rooms that shaped her, like the Rynborn in Antrim, where she played underage, the YardRock in Quincy, which closed in 2003 and where Ritscher remembers catching Toni Lynn Washington and Ronnie Earl.

“We just kind of miss it,” Nelson said. “We’re like, let’s get people together and do that.”

Ritscher views the Derry venue as a natural home for their revival.

“I always saw Tupelo as a blues club,” he said. “Maybe if we’re lucky this could turn into an annual thing. Even if it’s just a gift we can share once a year, just to show that we can break even, I’d be glad to be part of it.”

Picking eight artists out of a lifetime of influences was never going to be an easy task. Leonard Cohen was non-negotiable, as Nicole’s take on “Hallelujah” has become something of a signature. Also in a setlist swinging from Delta grit to lyrical poetry are songs from B.B. King, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Johnny Cash, Etta James, Aretha Franklin and more.

The night leans into American roots music from the ’60s and ’70s, while spanning the 20th century, with blues and jazz from the big-band era. Some choices came down to what still gives them chills, like Hopkins’ “Trouble in Mind,” a song that Nelson begins a cappella.

“One long note out into the crowd, holding it, making eye contact,” she said. “It’s so fun.”

Others arrived after years of deliberately avoiding them. For example, Nelson once sidestepped the Queen of Soul entirely.

“I always felt like everybody sings Aretha,” she said. Then a friend pushed back, telling her she had a gift not many could claim, and she relented. “The first time I sang ‘Natural Woman,’ I nearly lifted off the stage,” she said. “My whole body was tingling, and everyone felt it. Standing ovation. Now I’m like, OK, I’m going to lean into that a little.”

They won’t be doing it alone. Ali McGuirk and Jesse Dee, longtime collaborators, top a confirmed list of guests.

“Ali’s not really a blues singer,” Nelson said. “But she carries the tradition of songwriters deeply rooted in blues music; you hear it in her voice … she’s one of my favorite singers and closest friends.”

Dee, she added, is “phenomenal, a legend … anyone who knows him and has seen him is blown away.” To round out a lineup heavy on musicians they’ve shared stages and studios with for years, Ritscher invited horn player John McBride, “our brother up here” — and bandmate; when not gigging with Nelson, Ritscher plays drums in McBride’s group.

There will be more names. Pressed on surprises, the couple lit up talking about the Boston-scene elders who shaped them — Ronnie Earl, whom Ritscher has stayed in touch with, and Toni Lynn Washington, a singer Nelson suggested during the phone interview. “We can give her a call for sure,” she said. “She’s super wonderful and so inspirational.”

Asked if they were angling for a grand entrance to match Paul McCartney’s helicopter arrival to sing “Hey Jude” at Billy Joel’s final Shea Stadium show, Nelson didn’t hesitate. “That’s what we’re going for, we want some copters landing,” she exclaimed. “We’ll see what we can do.”

Kings & Queens
When: Friday, July 24, 8 p.m.
Where: Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry
Tickets: $35, tupelohall.com

Featured photo: Dwight+Nicole. Photo Credit Josh Steele.