I’m incredibly excited to tell you about my summer plans. So far, my tour dates for June-August include shows in Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nebraska, Michigan, and New Hampshire, and more are being added to the schedule every day. Keep watching the performances page for details!

And that’s the official poster. Can you see the piano?

See you out there,
Ben

4/29: PORTSMOUTH, NH – The Red Door, 9pm
5/2: JAMAICA PLAIN, MA – Midway Cafe, 8:30pm
5/3: BURLINGTON, VT – Radio Bean, 7pm
5/4: PORTLAND, ME – Dobra Tea, 6pm
5/18: MANCHESTER, MA – Manchester by the Book, 8pm
5/31: BRATTLEBORO, VT – Metropolis, 8pm
6/1: PORTLAND, ME – Blue, 6pm
6/27: CAMBRIDGE, MA – Lily Pad, 7pm

Hope to see you there!

One of the tour’s biggest thrills did not occur onstage though: while I was racing around the Midwest, Saint Anyway’s Jamie Kallestad and I (via a series of about 10,000 emails) were putting the finishing touches on a brand new EP from our side project, 90-Mile Portage. We played several shows in Vermont last weekend to hype its release, and will be putting on special shows in Salem and Somerville this Saturday and Sunday to officially and ceremoniously let it out into the world. But the CDs are here (they arrived from the factory yesterday), and we’re both delighted with how they came out:

You can listen to samples and order your copy in my store, or come to one of our concerts this weekend and pick one up in person. I’m very pleased with the way these songs came out: it was lots of fun to write and perform arrangements for Jamie’s songs, and a cool experience to work closely with a vocalist for the first time. Naturally we went through a healthy series of tug-of-wars during the mixing process, and I think the songs all benefitted tremendously from these. Neither of us can wait to hear what you think of the results.

For me, April will be spent playing relatively locally and working on a lot of new recordings. Stay tuned to see where those end up. And most importantly, thanks again to those of you who came out to shows, bought a CD, or offered me a couch last month as I passed through New York, Ontario, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and Louisiana. Meeting people like you is the best part of touring — especially in a winter like this one.

Midwest! I am coming for you. Later this month, I’ll be heading back out to one of my favorite parts of the country for shows in Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis, Duluth, Iowa City, and more (with a couple of stops in Vermont, Ontario, and New York along the way). Here are the dates:

3/1: BRATTLEBORO, VT – Metropolis Wine Bar, 8pm
3/14: MILWAUKEE, WI – Bremen Cafe, 9pm
3/15: MINNEAPOLIS, MN – 331 Club (with Saint Anyway), 10pm
3/16: MINNEAPOLIS, MN – Hell’s Kitchen (with Saint Anyway), 10am
3/16: NORTHFIELD, MN – The Contented Cow, 5pm
3/17: DULUTH, MN – Amazing Grace, 6pm
3/19: MADISON, WI – Indie Coffee, 7pm
3/20: IOWA CITY, IA – Uptown Bill’s, 7pm
3/21: GUELPH, ON – Community Music Collective, time TBA
3/22: ALBANY, NY – Hudson River Coffee, 7:30pm
3/22: ALBANY, NY – [house concert], 9:00pm

…and, something of a geographic outlier:
3/25: NEW ORLEANS, LA – Neutral Ground, 7pm

After that’s over, I’ll be out playing the first set of shows with 90-Mile Portage that we’ve had on the books for a couple of months; we’ll be playing five shows across Vermont and Massachusetts to promote the release of a little EP we’ve been putting together. Stay tuned for details on that front.

Meanwhile, progress is clicking along on a new solo project. And in unrelated news, an essay of mine about rivers appeared this week in both the Harvard Advocate and Land That I Live: check it out here.

See you in the northland (or New Orleans, admittedly about as non-northland as one can get) later this month!

Presenting the official poster and the next several dates for this year’s winter tour! I’ll be heading down the coast in January and hope to see you along the way:

12/28: BRATTLEBORO, VT – Metropolis Wine Bar, 8pm
1/17: JAMAICA PLAIN, MA – Midway Cafe, 8:30pm
1/19: NEW YORK, NY – Caffe Vivaldi, 8:30pm
1/20: WASHINGTON, DC – Electric Maid, 8pm
1/21: WASHINGTON, DC – Black Fox Lounge, 6:30pm
1/22: WILMINGTON, NC – Bottega Art Bar, 7pm
1/22: WILMINGTON, NC – Juggling Gypsy, 10pm
1/23: RICHMOND, VA – Globehopper Coffee, 6pm
1/24: MEDIA, PA – Seven Stones Cafe, 8pm
1/25: TARRYTOWN, NY – Silver Tips Tea, 12pm
1/26: NEW HAVEN, CT – private show, 9pm
2/2: BURLINGTON, VT – Radio Bean, 7pm

Today I’m releasing my first new recordings since Yankee Division, in the form of a seasonally-themed EP called Midwinter. I’m very excited about it, and I hope you are too. It features eight tracks, each of which is an instrumental reimagining of a traditional yuletide melody. I wanted to keep this from being a Big Old Cheerful Holiday Record though, and you’ll find that the music here is spare and quiet, meant to evoke stillness and snow rather than eggnog and Bing Crosby. I hope you enjoy it.

There’s a catch, though – this will only be around for a limited time. You can download Midwinter: Vol 1 here for a mere 5 bucks (no plans as yet to make hard copies of this, but if you’d really like one, email me and we can arrange something), but at the end of the season, it’s gone. Then you have to wait until next year, when I’ll make Vol 2, but that will obviously feature different music. In the meantime though, I’m happy that this is finally available, and I hope you like it. It’s been nice to have this to work on and I’ll miss these tunes.

Stay tuned, though, for performance announcements. I’ll be playing a pair of shows up in the great city of Portland, Maine this weekend, followed by a smattering of MA/NH gigs throughout the month of December. But then in January I’ll be going on a longer tour down along the east coast. Watch this space and the performances page for details in the coming weeks. I can’t wait to get on the road again. Clearly I’ve already forgotten what it’s like to sleep in a car in January.

Thanks again, everybody. Enjoy the holidays, and please check out Midwinter, here.

The fall has been busy in all sorts of unusual ways. For one thing I gave a talk at Harvard last week, which went much less disastrously than expected. I’ve been playing a lot, primarily around New England (though you’ll notice a few exceptional shows in Nebraska, Minnesota, Wisconsin and the like at the end of this month), both solo and in some really fun collaborations. I had the privilege of working with a spoken-word artist and some 100-year-old landscape photos on glass slides in a presentation at the RISD Museum last month, and have been performing with 90 Mile Portage, a joint project I’m undertaking with singer-songwriter Jamie Kallestad. These shows tend to be a cool mixture of his music and mine, along with some things we’ve worked up together. As you’ll see on the performances page, we’ll be playing several of them together in MA, VT, and ME in the coming weeks.

Primarily through, I’ve been doing a lot of recording. There will almost certainly be a new follow-up to Yankee Division available next year, and maybe even a small batch of other new material much sooner than that. Watch this space for details.

In the meantime though, come to a concert! I’m playing a lot between now and the end of the year, and I hope you can make it out to one of these shows. For starters, you can catch SA this week in Brattleboro, Turner’s Falls, Great Barrington, Burlington, Montpelier, or Cambridge.

I’m moving back to Cambridge this week, where I’m thrilled to be headquartered for the next several months. There are a few New England shows on the radar in the immediate future, a couple of exciting collaborations on the horizon, a northeastern tour with Saint Anyway in October, and if all goes according to plan I’ll be getting a lot of new material recorded over the course of the fall. Stay tuned for more news on all of these fronts, particularly that last one!

Thanks again, everybody. I had a blast at so many of the places I played at on this tour and can’t wait to come back.

Here’s the tour poster:

1. I recently finished writing and recording keys, strings, and horns for an excellent band from Duluth called Diet Folk (website here and entertainingly active Twitter feed here). The new record, which sounds absolutely brilliant from start to finish, is called “Cold,” and you can pick it up on iTunes here. It also features significant contributions from some members of Saint Anyway, and was lots of fun to work on. I’m thrilled with how nicely the whole thing came out – listen especially to “Carry,” “Cold,” and “Bird of Mine.”

2. I got some really nice press from Harvard Magazine this week. Check it out here.

3. I’ve been playing all sorts of little shows all over New England over the last month or so, and have just a couple more (in Vermont this weekend and Maine the following weekend) before I leave on a gigantic cross-country tour in mid-July. Dates for this (at least for its first leg, from New York to California) are almost completely finalized and can be viewed on the performances page. Happily, many of these gigs were booked by my new friends at Boss Booking and Management, to whom I’m extremely grateful for relieving me of all the most annoying parts of setting up a tour. I’ll be returning to New England at the beginning of September and will be recording intensively and playing locally for a while after that.

That’s all the news for now. Stay tuned for more announcements, particularly about dates for the national tour as they get locked down. Hope to see you somewhere this summer!