Helpless Trailer

After an amazing three night traveling triple bill with the Infamous Stringdusters and Chatham County Line, I'm now in Boston for four shows at Club Passim with Crooked Still.

Last night was the first night and it was probably my favorite show with the new lineup to date. Playing at Passim is always special for us and this being the first Boston area show with Brittany and Tristan it was even more memorable.

Check out this clip of Neil Young's "Helpless" from show at the Bowery two nights ago.



The other big news is that Crooked Still now owns a cargo trailer to haul our gear around. I was really excited about this but let me tell you, parking a trailer in New York City is no picnic! The good news is that we now have tons of room in the van for an entourage!

That's all for now. I'm off to buy an iPhone. I might try my hand at some live blogging from the stage. Not sure how the logistics of playing the bass and surfing the web at the same time will work.

Captain, Captain

Check out this performance of Captain, Captain from our recent Nashville show at the Basement!



Thanks to Bill for all of the great video footage of the show. Most of the set is up, so check it out!

Still Crooked World Tour

For those of you wondering what it's like to travel with a double bass, here's a photo taken at the Kirkwall airport in the Orkney Islands.

After an amazing tour in Denmark with Lissa, I met up with Crooked Still for the start of our summer CD release tour. Still Crooked, our third CD and first with new members Brittany Haas and Tristan Clarridge will be officially released on June 24th, but we decided to jump the gun and make it a world tour by spending a month in Europe before heading back home for festival season.

After Denmark the next stop was the Orkney Islands for the amazing Orkney Folk Festival. The lineup at this festival was amazing and we got to collaborate with our friends Kris Drever and Eamonn Coyne as well was Irish music powerhouse Solas and English folk singer Martin Simpson. Martin blew me away with his version of Little Musgrave, a song I perform with Lissa quite often. Here I am sitting in with Kris and Eamonn at one of the concerts.



It was an amazing time and I don't think any member of Crooked Still went to bed before six AM for the entire festival. It never really gets completely dark in Orkney this time of year which I think helps with the party stamina.

In an odd stroke of luck, the weather was perfect for the four days we were there and we were able take an epic 12 mile bike ride out to see some incredible standing stones and a 5000 year old village called Scara Brae. This place is older than Stonehenge and the Great Wall of China! Not to mention these things are huge!



After Orkney, we headed back to mainland Scotland for some gigs in Glasgow, Edinburgh and a quick trip down to Newcastle, England. Here's us at BBC Scotland after performing live on a radio show.



Except for our excursion to England, we relied entirely on public transportation for this portion of the trip, which is no small accomplishment with a double bass, cello, 5 people and all of our gear!

Here's slightly dark, but nice sounding clip of us at our Newcastle show.




We're now in Ireland and have had a great week of gigs! We also had a day off where we were able to hike out through a cow pasture to get a view of the Cliffs of Moher from the south, away from all the tourists. Ireland is a pretty stunning place.



We're here for two more nights and then head straight to California for a few shows! Check out the brand spanking new Crooked Still website for details. www.crookedstill.com

Shetland Ponies.... and Fiddlers

There are tumbleweeds blowing across my blog! Sorry for the lack of activity here the past few weeks. I'm back.

I spent the past week playing at the Shetland Folk Festival with Lissa Schneckenburger and now we are starting a week of gigs all around Denmark. Once again, we are joined by Keith Murphy on Guitar and Stefan Amidon on drums.

The Shetland Folk Festival lasts 5 days and is sandwiched between twelve hour long, over night ferry rides from Aberdeen to Shetland and back. All the performers for the festival are on the ferry together, so it's a huge party from the start. Here's a typical daily itinerary at the festival:

3:00 PM - Ride bus with four other bands to a remote village
4:00 PM - Sound check for concert
7:30 PM - Concert
11:30 PM - Ride bus back to Lerwick (the biggest town in Shetland)
12:00 AM - Party at the festival club. Huge sessions, dance parties, late night concerts
4:00 AM - Festival club closes, head to house party. More sessions etc.
7:00 AM - Breakfast
8:00 AM - Head to pub. More sessions and wackiness.

Stumble home sometime between 8:30 AM and noon.

And this goes on for FIVE DAYS STRAIGHT!!!! It's insane.

Even though Americans are not cut of for this level of partying, we put in a solid showing. We really bonded with the great French Canadian band, Le Vent Du Nord, and shared the stage with them a few times. Shetlanders are known for their fiddle playing and partying stamina but the Quebecois boys gave them a run for their money and did us proud. It was a blast.

Here's a couple youtube clips of us at one of the shows:




Shetland is also insanely beautiful in a kind spare and stark way. This is the typical look of the countryside.



Tons of sheep, puffins, seals and of course, Shetland Ponies!


I really love coming to Europe to play, but I have to say the one thing that drives me up the wall is the currency. Don't get me wrong, I love that all of the bills are different colors and that these days as the American dollar continues to tank, it's like getting a pay raise over here, but the amount of change I end up with is staggering. My pockets are always loaded with fistfuls of change! And the coins here are freaking heavy. I guess they don't call them pounds for nothing!

That's all for now!

Not in Kansas...

I just received this email from some friends who are performing in a month long Irish dance show in the mid-west. To protect the innocent, I'm changing the names and details, but you'll get the idea. It sounds amazing and bizarre. Here's the recap I received:

We are part of an Irish dance show that runs for 5 weeks and goes like this:

1) Fire dance + pretty girl dancers skipping around with bright orange scarves
2) Michael-Flatley-Riverdance-knock-off moment with boy dancer
3) Band number: two trad Irish tunes, goes into reggae groove in the middle
4) Mark comes out as emcee in green velvet jacket with gold sparkles
5) More music: Mark & Sharon sing a song, there's harp moment and bouzouki feature
6) Dance challenge! Mark introduces the contestants wrestler-style...
7) Square dance (hearing Mark say "allemande left, and around you go," is priceless)
8) GOSPEL NUMBER! Sharon & Liza, dressed in white bridal-style gowns (I am not kidding...) sing a glory-hallelujah-televangelist song. This is supposed to be a slick "Irish Gospel" number, whatever that means. This is an amazing and FIERCE dodgy moment. It's definitely my favorite part of the the show.
9) Finale, complete with percussive a cappella dance line

Oh, and shows begin at 11am--and the theater is full from the first show. It might seat 2,000? Not sure there... At each show I get one or two religious pamphlets, or Books of John.

Inbox

Ok. I admit it. I have a google alert set for my name and the names of every band and project I am associated with. Lame? Perhaps. Self indulgent? Most definitely.

Anyway, this just appeared in my inbox and comes from the Sunday Times in London. I thought I'd share it with you since Crooked Still is part of it and a large chunk of the piece is about my good friend and sometimes neighbor, Sam Amidon.

Sam Amidon and the folk revival


Also, Sam's mother Mary Alice Amidon has a blog, which you should read!

Idumea

Last but not least, hip hop legend, Coolio, has a cooking show which is needless to say, amazing.



That's all for now. Happy Saturday night without a gig!

The Way Life Should Be

I just got back from a run of shows in Maine and Boston with Lissa Schneckenburger! It was a great little warmup tour getting us ready for a bunch of CD release shows next month, which will celebrate the release of her new CD entitled "Song." Here's what it looks like:




Check out her spiffy new website too!

www.lissafiddle.com

One of the shows was a house concert in Camden, ME at the home of Tess Gerritsen who is a New York Times best selling author! Traveling around as a musician, you meet a lot of relatively successful and famous musicians, but it's not everyday you meet an author whose work is consistently listed with genre fiction heavyweights such as Stephen King, Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton! She's also a pretty damn good fiddle player!

I love artist residencies at venues. Giving a musician a weekly time slot for a set period of time where they can be loose, experiment with new material or new collaboration and simply play music they would otherwise not play if it were a typical gig. I think that sometimes musicians, myself included, get too caught up in putting on a "show" and forget to be spontaneous and relaxed and play for the sake of playing. A residency allows a musician to get away from their typical thing in a format that gives the audience a glimpse into their creative process.

I've recently been a part of two fantastic residencies in Boston. I mentioned a couple of posts ago being a part of Rose Polenzani's Sub Rosa series which is a residency of sorts and last Saturday night I played a bit with fiddler Hanneke Cassel at her late night residency at Club Passim. It was a blast and great to see and hear Hanneke in some different musical settings than her usual trio!