Amy Speace and The Sea The Sea will perform this special event to benefit The New England Folk Music Archives.
Produced by Last Dance Productions
The New England Folk Music Archives is pleased to welcome Amy Speace and The Sea,The Sea to one of the great listening rooms in town.
AMY SPEACE
Amy Speace has been quietly but steadily making waves in the Americana/folk world for a few years now, and in the journey, gaining support from the likes of Judy Collins, Nanci Griffith, Guy Clark and other icons in the songwriting community. A self-described ‘late bloomer’ to songwriting, Speace landed in New York City after college to pursue a life in theater. She studied acting at The National Shakespeare Conservatory, toured the US with the National Shakespeare Company, started her own theater company to direct and produce the plays she had written, and in the midst of her early 20’s, picked up a pawn shop guitar, wrote her first songs, and found herself with steady gigs at such storied venues as The Bitter End and The Living Room.
On April 16, Wind Bone Records/Tone Tree will release “How to Sleep In A Stormy Boat” an 11 song album, produced by Neilson Hubbard, with collaborations with John Fullbright, Mary Gauthier and Ben Sollee.
THE SEA, THE SEA
The Sea The Sea weave their many voices into one. Since the Fall of 2011, Chuck e. Costa and Mira Stanley have been touring the country, making new friends and evolving their sound. Now a playful mix of old and new, acoustic and electric, raw and graceful, TSTS has created an inspired trove of harmony-rich, lyric driven songs. Dynamic and sincere, simple and true, their live shows will leave you stirring.
No Depression Says:
Last night, inside a cold Dobbs Ferry church with the snow falling outside, I sat and listened to a young couple who just this week recorded their first album together. If their performance is any indication, the April release will bring a welcome relief to a cold winter. To say I was taken with Chuck E. Costa and Mira Stanley who perform as The Sea The Sea would be an understatement. On top of well-crafted songs, commanding stage presence and instrumental abilities, their voices in close harmony evoked for me a sound landing somewhere between Bowling Green and Bakersfield.
Anyone not familiar with the music of Bill Staines is in for a special treat.
Last Dance Productions is pleased to welcome Bill Staines to one of the great listening rooms in town, the New England Folk Music Archives. The event takes place on on Wednesday, July 17th at 7pm. We’ll have a conversation with Bill recording his thoughts about the Folk Scene in New England over the past years that will be deposited into our growing oral history collection.
After the conversation we’ll be treated to a performance by Bill Staines.
For more than forty years, Bill Staines has traveled back and forth across North America, singing his songs and delighting audiences at festivals, folksong societies, colleges, concerts, clubs, and coffeehouses. A New England native, Bill became involved with the Boston-Cambridge folk scene in the early 1960′s and for a time, emceed the Sunday Hootenanny at the legendary Club 47 in Cambridge. Bill quickly became a popular performer in the Boston area. From the time in 1971 when a reviewer from the Boston Phoenix stated that he was “simply Boston’s best performer”, Bill has continually appeared on folk music radio listener polls as one of the top all time favorite folk artists. Now, well into his fifth decade as a folk performer, he has gained an international reputation as a gifted songwriter and performer.
Dar Williams with Special Guest Catie Curtis
A benefit concert for Americans United for Separation of Church and State
Friday, February 5th at 7:30pm
Tickets and More Info: Click Here
“Dar Williams is a songwriter of immense talent” – Telegraph UK
Williams growth as an individual over her almost two-decade-long career has gone hand-in-hand with her evolution as an artist. Raised in Chappaqua, N.Y., and educated at Wesleyan University, Williams spent 10 years living in the thriving artistic community of Northampton, Mass., where she began to make the rounds on the coffeehouse circuit. Joan Baez, an early fan of her music, took Williams out on the road and recorded several of her songs.
Every new album from Dar Williams represents her thoughts and feelings about both her own life and larger forces in the world. But her ninth studio record, Emerald, marks a particularly dramatic confluence between her experiences and broader contemporary culture—and what it means to be a songwriter at this moment in history.
“I’m now experiencing the fruits of the alternative culture I was part of in the ‘90s,” she says. “I think I’ve made choices about how I lived my life, outside of the world that was going to fit me among the mainstream norms, and I chose to stay with my friends, to stay with my culture. That turns out to have been the sturdiest structure I could have built for myself. And that’s in my songs, it’s in my teaching. I’m a believer in what can happen when we make music together.” – Dar Williams
Special Guest Catie Curtis
Catie Curtis is a veteran on the singer/songwriter folk scene. She’s performed at the White House, two Presidential Inaugural Balls, with Lilith Fair, and at Carnegie Hall. Winner of several Boston Music Awards, she also took the Grand Prize in the 2006 International Songwriting Competition (out of 15,000 entries). The New Yorker called Catie a “folk-rock goddess.”
Americans United for Separation of Church and State is a nonpartisan organization that lobbies, educates and litigates in order to preserve the constitutional principle of church-state separation as the only way to ensure religious freedom for all Americans.
Tickets and More Info: Click Here
