I’m in Minnesota again right now, and I’ll be heading out to Wyoming for a few days after that, but then I’m returning to the northeast at the end of this month to play several solo shows around New England and in New York. Particularly of note: on June 1st, I’ll be returning to one of my favorite local venues, the great Lily Pad of Inman Square, Cambridge, to open for Heather Maloney. It’s my first solo show in the Boston area since I left to go on tour in March, and I hope that many of you can make it out to see! Details, as usual, can be found by clicking on the accordion at the top of this page.

Lots of other plans are in the works as well: I’ve been generating a big pile of new music and I’ll be devoting a lot of time this summer to paring it down and getting some of it recorded. I’m also working with a booking agency for the first time to set up a big national tour in late summer, for which I hope to announce dates relatively soon. Keep checking back here for details.

Thanks again for all your support on this spring’s tours! Hope to see you again soon.

PS. After a set I played in Montreal, a local music blog reviewed an in-progress, untitled song I road-tested there. Check it out here, complete with video.

After taking a week or two off to write and record some new material, I’m about to set out on a thrilling international tour that will take me up through Vermont, Montreal, Guelph (please note: one of the best cities in Canada), Milwaukee, Madison, and the Twin Cities before finishing up with another show at Kaleidoscope way out in San Francisco. Details are over on the performances page, so come to a show if you can! I hope to see a lot of you colder people up there — hopefully I’ll be coming through just as your cities are beginning to thaw.

I’ll leave you with this promo video they shot at RAW: Boston earlier this month. It shows about 45 seconds of gyrating models and things like that, and then they start interviewing a writhingly awkward me about my life and career. Watch me talk about musical representation of place while someone soundchecks a drumset in the background:

Thanks again, guys. See you up north!

The tour was brilliant though. I can’t thank you all enough for coming out and supporting me in these new locations, and I’m glad to have made so many new mid-Atlantic and southern friends along the way. I had a great time wandering down the coast, and as usual it was lots of fun to crash around North Carolina and Tennessee with Saint Anyway at the bottom of the trip. I’ll be joining them again in Minnesota at the end of April, and I’m eagerly looking forward to it.

I’m local in March, however, and will be playing a cluster of shows up here in the next couple weeks. I’m doing a set in Shelburne Falls at the one-of-a-kind Mocha Maya’s on Sunday, and shows in Vermont and New York City next week. I’m also being featured in a completely outrageous local showcase run by a group called RAW: Boston, and will be playing alongside various other local musicians, artists, fashion designers, filmmakers, and more in a sort of artistic circus being held on March 8th. The event is ticketed, but one ticket gets you in for the whole insane thing. Please come! For one thing, I am required to sell a certain number of tickets by March 5th, so I’ll really appreciate your help even if you’re not sure you can make it. Here’s the link: http://www.rawartists.org/boston/stimulus/?artistid=48787.

Hope to see you on the 8th, Boston. But many thanks to the rest of the east coast for a great February!

As you’ll notice on the “Performances” page, I’m also sketching out the next two months: March will be a return to New England and New York (including another show at Pianos and a showcase in Boston), but April will involve a drive back out to the Midwest and a quick detour to California in the middle of all that. Keep checking back as these tours are updated.

That’s all for now. Hope to see you somewhere along the east coast this month!

Check it out in the store!

Thanks, by the way, to everyone who came out to the concerts in Cambridge, Brattleboro, and NYC earlier this month. Playing in New Hampshire and New York later this week. Hope to see you there!

For those who don’t remember the old version, this place used to look like a tundra:

.
Good job, Zach.

Some other good news: yesterday I played the first show of this winter’s northeastern mini-tour, which is sending me through several cool places in NYC, Boston, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and more. For details, click on that accordion I mentioned, and please swing by for a show if it looks like I’ll coming through your city.

Thanks for all your company and support in 2011, everybody.
Happy New Year, and hope to see many of you soon.
Ben

Click here to open map

In other news, I’m lining up a string of solo shows in some pretty exciting locations around the northeast for January and February of 2012. Come out to one of these if you can! For details, head over to the performances page of this site (updated as gigs are confirmed).

It’s also available for download via iTunes here… but you miss out on the packaging and don’t have that chance at a shirt. Good place to go if you want to try sampling all the tracks, though.

They’re also poised to release their new album, Here on the Ground, to which I contributed piano, organ, accordion, and various brass things. The record sounds great, and they’re planning to have it out around Thanksgiving. In the meantime though, check out this track they’ve put out in anticipation of the release. The ending features what I now acknowledge to be an oddly mariachi-flavored trumpet part for a bluegrass song.

After that, I’ll be heading up to Boston, back in the land of reasonably-sized states. Keep watching this space for more performance announcements and other news. I’ll be touring the east coast with Saint Anyway again in a couple of weeks (and I’ve just started recording backing parts for their new record, which will be done this winter and already sounds fantastic), and am hoping to line things up in New England for the weeks after that. Thanks again for all your support on this last tour — whether you came out to a show, bought a T-shirt, put me up, fed me, or anything, I really appreciate it and couldn’t have done this without you. Hope to try it again soon!