Category: Nightlife

Northlands Festival returns

As John Shields begins a phone interview, he’s also readying a jagged week of travel, a mini-tour that includes a quick show in Wisconsin, followed by his band’s first Bonnaroo, and concluding with the fifth annual Northlands Festival in Swanzey.

“It’s wonky,” he allowed with a laugh, “but the money’s good.”

A decade ago he co-founded the Charleston-based duo Little Stranger with Kevin Shields. Kevin and John aren’t related, but their shared last name has confused fans and strangers alike for years. They’re used to it, though. “Some people say, ‘I was just talking to your brother,’” John said. “At this point I’m like, ‘hell yeah, we’re brothers.’ We’re all brothers, man.”

The two did go to high school together outside of Philadelphia but ran in different circles and played with different bands. They reconnected years later, after John had attended the College of Charleston, played in a local band there, then moved back to Philly. After that, John returned to South Carolina and uncertainty.

Facing a music career playing in a wedding band or cobbling together restaurant gigs, he reached out to Kevin. A carefully composed email — John called it “romantic” — was enough to convince his friend to follow him south.

“I basically courted him to come down and join me in Charleston,” he said. “He did it, and he’s been here since.”

In short order they threw their gear in a Hyundai Sonata and embarked on a years-long grind through bars and clubs. Greg Knight saw them play for 15 fans at Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory in 2021 and came away impressed. Now he’s pleased to have them near the top of the bill at the festival he and Seth McNally launched a year later.

For McNally, Little Stranger’s brand of road-tested hustle is exactly what Northlands was created to celebrate.

“Independent festivals are crucial, beating hearts for the live music ecosystem,” he said in an email. “Northlands offers artists a relaxed environment to actually hang out, cross-pollinate, and collaborate with one another in an intimate setting.”

For first-timers at Northlands, McNally promises an experience that feels less like a concert than a community.

“We’ve designed the weekend to feel like a massive family reunion,” he said, “a boutique-style gathering where community, art installations, live muralists, and eclectic local food and craft vendors share the spotlight with the big bands.”

Little Stranger resists easy genre classification. Listeners and critics have variously called them hip-hop, indie, and reggae-adjacent. Shields has come to countenance this ambiguity. “Early on, I worried it would be a liability, but I’ve come to like that, and I think our fan base really enjoys it too.”

Live, Kevin acts as emcee with John live looping on guitar and employing drum and bass pads. A sax and trumpet player joined not long ago. “To beef up the live sound,” Shields explained, adding that shows are varied. “Something funny could happen in the crowd that becomes a thread throughout … we try not to repeat the same set every time.”

A new studio album, Broken Hearted Boys Club, arrives July 17. Little Stranger’s third LP, it includes collaborations with Andy Frasco, whose band The U.N. is playing Sunday at Northlands, along with members of the band’s growing extended musical family. The title refers to how a few of the latter group became John’s roommates.

“Four years ago I went through a bad breakup, and then Damn Skippy went through a bad breakup,” Shields recalled. “I was like, come on, move in, buddy. Then another good friend went through one, so we named the house Brokenhearted Boys Club. That’s where a ton of the music was made.”

Shields believes the new record is their most cohesive to date.

“There’s maybe a little more honesty in the lyrics,” he said. “We always write better when we’re happy, but even the sad songs on this one are kind of upliftingly sad. It’s the homies helping the homies out.”

The production, he continued, is intentionally raw, with fewer vocal edits, less tuning, more first takes. The Frasco collab, “Love You When I’m Sad,” is the third song the two have written together. “We banged it out in an afternoon from scratch at the house,” Shields said. “He’s just easy to write with, always throwing out ideas. He’s a great writer.”

The release will be followed by their biggest tour yet. They’ll play 800- to 1,500-capacity venues and, a far cry from their Hyundai days, travel by bus.

“That’s a big milestone,” John said, giddy. “It’s the first time we’ve truly lined up an album drop with a tour. Our albums always take longer to finish than you’d think. We feel like we nailed the rollout on this one.”

Northlands Festival
When: Friday, June 19, through Sunday, June 21
Where: Cheshire Fairgrounds, 247 Monadnock Hwy., Swanzey
Tickets: $25 and up (single day), $269 and up (three-day pass), northlandslive.com

Festival main performers
Friday, June 19
Dirty Heads, Little Stranger, Mihali, Circles Around The Sun, Ghost-Note, Magoo, Night Zero, and Hayley Jane Band
Saturday, June 20
Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, Dogs In A Pile, Lotus, The Slip, Kanika Moore & the Brown Eyed Bois, and Caylin Costello
Sunday, June 21
Disco Biscuits, Andy Frasco & The U.N., Super Sonic Shorties, Moontricks, Jennifer Hartswick Band, Dizgo, Sqwerv, Annie in the Water and DJ Brownie.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Indie comedy grows in Manchester

When he last was in Manchester, Shane Torres appeared at Shaskeen Pub. In 2021, it was one of the few places in the city for his brand of comedy. Since then, though, the scene has grown. Comedy at Queen City Center began in April, Strange Brew Tavern’s Laugh Attic has a good groove going, and now a theater district coffee bar is in the game.

Early returns are more than encouraging. The Moka Pot, near the corner of Elm and Hanover, has two shows with Seattle comic Bo Johnson on April 12. The early set sold out weeks ago, with only a few tickets remaining for the late one. Coming up are Aaron Berg (July 31 and Aug. 1), Brendan Sagalow (Aug. 8) and Robby Slowik (Aug. 21).

The Moka Pot is ready, with a recently issued liquor license and new LED lighting array. Alex LaChance is the venue’s comedy booker. With fellow comic Nick Sands, LaChance also runs the game show parody Wrong Hill to Die On at the Shaskeen, which returns for a third time on July 14. The first Wrong Hill event sold out, and the second came close.

The day after Johnson’s show, Torres will appear at Queen City Center. The laconic Texas native has had a lot of success since his last visit. His first special, The Blue Eyed Mexican, came out at the end of 2023. Vulture praised its “beautiful directness and keen sense of good storytelling,” calling it “a refreshing combination of delicate and obscene.”

Torres’s other recent credits include The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, though he didn’t get the McCartney treatment when he appeared, as Colbert was out of town that night. The host pretaped introductions for him and a few other comics. “Sadly, it was not the version I’d dreamed of,” Torres said by phone recently. “No couch, no Stephen.”

Another late-night talk show helped elevate Torres in 2017. He appeared on Conan O’Brien and went viral for defending shock-haired Food Network host Guy Fieri. It was 10 years ago, but the bit still follows him around, and he professes to be at peace with his “Free Bird” moment.

“I don’t do that bit anymore, but sometimes people will call for it,” he said. “Like, I was in Seattle doing Fremont Abbey, a really cool room, and somebody yelled something about Guy Fieri. This other guy shouted, ‘That’s how I heard about you,’ and another one said, ‘Me too!’ So I have that to be grateful for.”

He and fellow comedian Katherine Blanford’s Coastal Idiots podcast stands out in a crowded field. The two “frenemies” have a delightful Odd Couple banter well-suited to Torres’s laid back demeanor. Recurring bits include a contest to guess the sale price of various works of art, some museum worthy, others county fair castoffs.

Torres balances all this with incessant touring.

“Last year I did something like 250,000 miles, and that was just on Delta,” he said. “Not even including riding on a tour bus for a few weeks, or driving from Chicago to Milwaukee to Madison to Minneapolis. The only mileage accounted for is just through the Delta app.”

He’s looking forward to coming back to Manchester, recalling doing many shows at the Shaskeen when it was booked by Nick Lavallee, who’s now in charge of Queen City Center’s comedy events, and will also be opening up his Wicked Joyful retail store in the Canal Street facility on June 20.

Torres enjoyed hanging out with Lavallee in the Shaskeen days.

“I always had fun there,” he said. “Nick is a friend; he’s an old indie rock kind of punk rock guy like me. That’s the kind of culture and stuff he came up in as a kid. So we had a little bit of that in common.”

Along with the success Torres has experienced since his last visit is a newfound desire to savor it more, including when he’s back in New Hampshire.

“I will appreciate being in this place more presently,” he said, adding, “There’s a difference between logically knowing you’ve moved forward … and feeling it, recognizing it and appreciating it.”

Torres’s next big career milestone happens after his Manchester show. In August he’ll head to the legendary Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where he’ll perform his one-man show, tentatively titled Skinned Knees. The show is about his mother’s coma and his father’s homelessness, framed as comedy about what home means and what masculinity looks like.

“It’s going to be terrifying,” he said, adding that he hopes people will find laughs among the show’s poignancy. “I’m afraid people are going to be like, ‘You’re brave!’ And I’ll be like, ‘and funny?” That’s a real fear, but also a self-deflating (and funny) joke in his statement, a combination that is the Shane Torres essence.

Bo Johnson
When: Friday, June 12, 9:30 p.m. (7 p.m. show sold out)
Where: Moka Pot, 8 Hanover St., Manchester
Tickets: $25, eventbrite.com

Shane Torres
When: Saturday, June 13, 6:30 p.m.
Where: Queen City Center, Canal Street, Manchester
Tickets: $25, eventbrite.com ($30 day of show)

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Jon Pousette-Dart plays intimate Rex show

As he walked into Quadrafonic Sound Studio to begin his band’s first album in 1972, Jon Pousette-Dart heard the strains of another session. Curious, he looked in to find Dobie Gray finishing up his classic single “Drift Away,” with a stunning group of players behind him.

Awestruck, Pousette-Dart made a mental promise in that moment to someday record with them himself.

Four decades and change later, it happened. His solo album Talk gathered together guitarist Reggie Young, who plucked the delicate chords on Gray’s song, Kenny Malone on percussion, bass player Glen Worf, and Clayton Ivey on keyboards. “All these original Muscle Shoals guys,” Pousette-Dart recalled by phone recently. “It’s got a really nice feel.”

With a roots-fueled remake of his band’s late-’70s radio hit “Amnesia” and “Invisible,” a lively rocker co-written with John Oates, Talk is also his best solo album. “The Story of My Life,” a Nathan Meckel/Blue Miller ballad that deserves to be a wedding dance standard, is another of the disc’s gems.

Alas, it’s the 21st century, where great records are born and disappear on the regular. As much as he enjoyed making Talk, Pousette-Dart wishes more people had heard the album when it came out 11 years ago. But industry economics got in the way, along with a streaming algorithm that punishes long players.

“I put a lot of work into it, and it was just typical with the way things are … it just sailed by,” he lamented. “Because the whole delivery system of records has really changed, you know?” He’s not surprised; after all, he named his 2002 album Sample This as a dare to the music business when it began to implode.

“There was an awful lot of stuff going on [at the time] that was kind of turning my stomach, so I made light of it,” he said.

So he’s adapted, releasing new music song by song. His most recent single is 2024’s “Cry No More,” with its virtual flip side, the NRBQ nugget “Only You.” His next one, “Gone,” is due soon. “It’s about the universal loss that so many people are going through right now in the world,” Pousette-Dart said.

“Gone” will have a music video, something he’s done since a film made with “Who I Am” went viral. That song, written with Dawn Young (Pousette-Dart’s wife) and singer/songwriter Jaime Kyle, addressed Young’s mother’s journey through Alzheimer’s. “That’s been in film festivals all over the world,” he said. “Because it just hits home to so many people.”

One thing he hasn’t grown weary of or cynical about is performing live. In its heyday, his eponymous band was a touring force, and since its dissolution in the 1980s Pousette-Dart has continued to play the songs that inhabited Boston radio and points beyond, like “Harder,” “What Can I Say” and “There’s Been a Mistake.”

At an upcoming show in Manchester he’ll be joined by longtime accompanist Jim Chapdelaine, who has an interesting backstory of his own. A true multi-hyphenate, Chapdelaine is an Emmy-winning composer and a producer. He’s worked with Paula Cole and Delbert McClinton, and mastered projects for Clarence Clemons with Bruce Springsteen.

They met at the Harvard Coop record store in Cambridge when both were starting out; Chapdelaine worked there, and Pousette-Dart had a deal with the store’s record buyer to trade in his used albums for new ones (side note: absolutely no one called them “vinyls” back then).

“He started a band called Mr. Right and got signed to Epic, so we were bouncing around at the same time,” Pousette-Dart recalled. “We reconnected many years later when he was playing with a friend of mine at a function. I really liked him, so I asked if he wanted to come out with the band … that’s how it started.”

Twenty-five years on, they have an easy rapport as they glide through Pousette-Dart’s catalog in a format that delights them both.

“You’re taking the songs back to where they begin … it always starts with an intimate, voice guitar setting, and that’s when you really know you have a song or you don’t,” Pousette-Dart said. “You can’t produce something into being a good song … it’s got to have it from the heart and soul.”

Jon Pousette-Dart Duo
When: Friday, June 5, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $40, palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Nashville story has a New Hampshire ending

Amanda McCarthy is back in New Hampshire, after living and working in Nashville for the past several years. The singer-songwriter is still following her dream of music success, but she’s returning with a clearer sense of purpose, along with something she found harder to hold onto in Music City: joy.

“I’ve just been very disenchanted by Nashville,” she said by phone recently, while packing up her husband’s and daughter’s things and readying for final shows there in mid-May. After a Kentucky date on the return drive, her first Granite State gig is May 27 at Fratello’s Italian Grille in Manchester.

McCarthy said she began thinking about coming home after a harrowing moment about three years into her stay in the city. A tornado tore through her neighborhood, leveling nearly every building around her. Miraculously, her apartment was barely touched. However, she was shaken.

A 17-year-old boy was pulled from a unit that McCarthy originally was scheduled to occupy herself. That fact haunted her.

“I kind of had an existential crisis,” she recalled. “I just started thinking … music is fun, but what really matters? When I’m 80, what do I want to matter to me?”

Along with missing the ocean and the mountains, she desired the freedom to be herself and stop worrying about industry expectations. Another factor was her daughter, now in grade school. “Tennessee education is going downhill,” she said. “Opening that door allowed me to be honest with myself about myself as well.”

Still, McCarthy is clear-eyed about Nashville’s upside. Her second album, Looking for the Light, is evidence of that. The sophomore effort is a confident, layered collection of songs that swings from Nashville-flavored rockers to personal and confessional songs.

A through line from her debut LP Road Trip is both clear, and deliberate. The first record was about escaping challenges in her home town. Life ultimately worked out in Nashville, but she realized, “I can’t go back to New Hampshire until I can tackle the things I ran away from up there.”

The move, McCarthy concedes almost grudgingly, was a success. She credits the city with sharpening her craft in ways that wouldn’t have happened anywhere else.

“Even the bad parts really helped me,” she said. The relentless pace of Nashville’s live circuit, with longer sets, fewer breaks and lower pay, built a stamina she now takes for granted.

“Now, when I go home and I do a three-hour show with breaks, it’s really easy,” she explained. “I’ve always compared singing longer gigs to running. You don’t run 3 miles overnight. You start with a half mile and work your way up.”

After Fratello’s, she’s at Washington General Store for its music series May 28, and Exeter Brewing on May 30.

Her craft also evolved. Collaborating with a bevy of talented songwriters, she absorbed new techniques — sometimes at the expense of her own voice.

“At one point, I was writing with other people so much, I almost forgot to write by myself,” she said. “So I took a step back … to get back in touch with that part of me.”

When she’s back home, McCarthy is eager to rediscover something Nashville’s music economy had slowly drained out of her performing life — the simple pleasure of making people happy. She’s also eager to leave behind the Nashville norm of demanding twenty bucks to play a song request.

“At home I would just take everyone’s request and they’d probably tip me $20 or more anyway,” she said. “It really took out the joy of performing. I love making money from music, but I want it to be natural, not forced.” She didn’t comment on whether her policy applied to playing “Free Bird” or “Mustang Sally.”

Regarding whether Nashville was worth it, and if she accomplished what she set out to do, McCarthy offered an answer that reflected the work she’s done on herself.

“A lot of my obsession around trying to be famous… was from wanting to prove people wrong,” she said. “Through a mix of therapy and reassessing … it’s like none of that matters.”

What does matter, she concluded, “is what I’ve accomplished.” McCarthy is returning to where she began having bought a home with money she made as a musician. Beyond that, she’s written songs that hold up, that are true to who she is. “I do feel like I should be proud of myself for that.”

Amanda McCarthy
When: Thursday, May 28, 6 p.m.
Where: Washington General Store, 29 Main St., Washington
More: Full show schedule, including a June 3 gig at Homestead Restaurant in Merrimack, at amandamccarthy.com

Featured photo: Amanda McCarthy. Photo credit: Phil Silverberg

The Janzen Boys make first New England visit

While anchored by steady acoustic bass, joyful strumming and finger-picked flourishes, the not-so-secret sauce of folk trio The Janzen Boys is their gorgeous harmonizing. The Canadian band — guitarist John “JJ” Janzen and his sons Mick (mandolin and drums) and Simon (bass) — delivers utterly transcendent vocals.

A stellar example is “Flight To JFK,” a single released early in the year. Their blending on the Theo Kandel cover evokes memories of hearing Crosby, Stills and Nash first sing together in Cass Elliot’s Laurel Canyon home in 1968. When it happened initially for The Janzen Boys, JJ was just as stunned by their blood harmony.

“I would cry like a baby the first few times,” he said in a recent Zoom meeting that included Mick. “They’re like, ‘Dad, why are you crying?’ and I’d say, ‘It’s OK … I’m just happy, and sometimes the happy comes out of my face like that.’ Because it sounded so good, and I couldn’t believe it.”

That it happened at all was a product of coercion, albeit gentle.

After living in Japan for most of their lives, the Janzen family moved back to Ottawa in the early 2010s. At the time, they were taking a break from music.

“My marriage was kind of falling apart,” JJ explained. When a busking gig opened up in 2012, Simon wanted to restart the band. This bothered Mick, who felt the initial idea to form a group was his.

However, Mick played drums because, JJ explained, “He hated being at the front of the stage,” and he also didn’t sing. “I saw an opportunity … I said, ‘OK, you can be in, but only if you sing and play, because Simon sings and plays and I sing and play. You have to sing too.’ And then he said, ‘OK, fine.’”

With that, three voices became a breathtaking chorus. Fourteen years later, The Janzen Boys are a mainstay in their home country and recently began touring in the U.S. They’re also readying their first visit to the U.K. later this year. Critics liken them to a male version of The Wailin’ Jennys, as well as fellow Canadians Neil Young and Barenaked Ladies.

A sad truth of the modern music business is that talent isn’t everything. Fortunately, they’ve found novel ways to succeed. Mick is their social media maven, posting compelling mini-clips of the band’s music on social media to drive ticket sales. A recent a cappella version of the Scottish traditional song “The Parting Glass” on Instagram is a good example.

JJ does booking and a few years back found a unique and quite lucrative approach to it that finds them performing in a lot of places that are new to hosting live music. Two such venues are part of their upcoming area run — Bradford’s Town Hall on May 24, and a May 22 date at Peterborough’s Community Theatre that’s already sold out.

Their self-promotion strategy “is not brand new, and we didn’t invent it, but there are not a lot of bands doing it,” JJ said, “but it’s becoming more popular mainly because it can make music possible and profitable in a time where it’s been pretty challenging. We just find a community hall with a stage that rents for a reasonable price, and lets you set up chairs.”

Ultimately, the music carries them, sometimes in unexpected ways. Like the fan in Kentucky who wanted the band to play her daughter’s wedding enough to spend thousands of dollars to clear a months-long visa roadblock, because she believed their harmony could settle down two politically fractious families.

“She actually said, ‘I want you to come sing some peace into the situation,’” JJ recalled. The gathering became an anchor for their first Stateside tour in 2024. “She said, ‘I’m dreading how this wedding could possibly go. Your music makes me feel calm and peaceful, so I want you to come and sing.’”

It’s soothing music, agreed Mick. “A friend of mine said to me, ‘Harmonies are a drug, and you guys are smoking it.’”

All Your Friends

Featured photo: All Your Friends. Courtesy photo.

Post-millennium All Your Friends party hits Nashua

While Napster and LimeWire were treating the record business like termites attacking a wooden house, some decent music came in the wake of Y2K. Late-’90s artists like Radiohead and Bjork inspired MGMT, Passion Pit, LCD Soundsystem and others to merge dance, melodic pop and rock in pursuit of a new sound.

Indietronica, as the loose subgenre came to be known, energized club New York City denizens throughout the 2000s. An upcoming event in Nashua will celebrate it with DJ music, multimedia and dancing. All Your Friends is the latest themed party to come from Brooklyn-based Burwoodland.

The company launched in 2015 with Emo Night Brooklyn and has added a half dozen more events since, including two that have recently been done in New Hampshire: Gimme Gimme Disco and a musical theater costume party, Broadway Rave. They also offer K-Pop and metal nights, along with one for ex-clubbers with kids that ends before 10 p.m.

Best friends Alex Badanes and Ethan Maccoby didn’t anticipate growing to more than 1,200 shows a year while recruiting close to 100 DJs to host events nationally. Or billionaire Mark Cuban making what Music Business Worldwide described as a “seven-figure investment” in the company in January 2026.

“Honestly, we were just looking to have a good time,” Maccoby said by phone recently. He and Badanes always enjoyed hosting parties before going to shows, but decided, “Instead of a pre-game at our apartment, we wanted to throw it at a bar, so that we didn’t have to clean up. Maybe they’d give us some free alcohol. That was really the main motivation.”

The very first Emo Night Brooklyn was held in early 2015 at the 100-capacity basement of the now-closed Cameo bar in Williamsburg. Hundreds of people showed up, and they were invited back. The next bash happened in the Cameo’s larger upstairs area. What began as a free party just kept growing.

All Your Friends, which debuted in 2025, is a fan’s effort.

“We started it because Alex and I also love this music, but we also saw that there was a big demand for it as well,” Maccoby said. “The first two events we had Passion Pit and Matt & Kim at the show with us. They put on a DJ set that was amazing; that kind of kick-started the series.”

“As millennials, we feel like we grew up with these artists,” Badanes told Paper magazine when the event launched. “I was at Berklee while Passion Pit was coming up in the early 2010s, and I still remember seeing one of their first Boston shows, how electric it felt, how new it all sounded. That era shaped so much of our musical identity.”

It became a quick success.

“We only just started like a little less than a year ago and we’ve had, I think, over a hundred or so All Your Friends events, many sold out, all around the U.S. and Canada,” he said. “It’s been really cool, and we’re now excited to come back to Nashua in May.”

The format is DJ-driven, but the production goes beyond a laptop and a speaker stack. Visuals are projected throughout the evening, synchronized to specific songs, and glow sticks find their way into the crowd. Still, they’re careful not to over-engineer the experience.

“We try to keep things raw and lightweight and just authentic,” he said. “Just come out to an affordable, awesome night, meet a bunch of other people who are into the same music.” Affordability is important; average ticket prices run between $20 and $30.

Attendees routinely rave about the events.

“People meet their best friends, their wives, their husbands,” Maccoby said. “People get engaged and we DJ their weddings. It’s really cool, the community these things create, because obviously music brings people together from all different backgrounds.”

All Your Friends
When: Friday, May 15, at 8 p.m.
Where: Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua
Tickets: $26 and up at etix.com

Featured photo: All Your Friends. Courtesy photo.