Summer 2019 and Some Recent Adventures

Hi, everyone.

Hello from Portland, Maine, where leaves are finally emerging and the sun has reappeared! It's an enormous relief to be back in a vaguely temperate place after the tour I was on last month through Georgia and the Carolinas, where a heat wave called -- I'm absolutely serious -- a "death ridge" was keeping things at a miserably muggy 95 or so.

I'm mostly writing because I've got a handful of shows coming up in the next month or so, including a neat opening spot tomorrow night at Cambridge's storied Club Passim, where my swashbuckling Victorian pals Son of Town Hall will be releasing their new CD into the Bostonian air. Details for all my shows, as always, are at www.bencosgrove.com, but here are the bare facts of the next several, in brief:

6/5 CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Club Passim, supporting Son of Town Hall (tickets here)
6/6 BLOCK ISLAND, RI -- Bird House
6/8 KINGSTON, NY -- Clorfiene Studio
6/14 BOSTON, MA -- Sofar x Hyatt Centric (enter drawing for tickets here)
6/26 HELENA, MT -- Montana Book Co.
6/27 GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, MT -- Park Headquarters
6/27 ADEL, MT -- Sieben Live Stock Ranch
7/1 ASHTON, ID -- Shoppe on Main
7/2 PORTLAND, OR -- House Concert
7/3 LINCOLN CITY, OR -- Lincoln City Cultural Center
7/5 OTIS, OR -- Sitka Center for Art & Ecology ("Music of the Landscape" workshop)
7/6 SEATTLE, WA -- [private event]
7/7 SEATTLE, WA -- Collins House

I'm not sure when I last wrote to all of you, but things have been busy. I recently had the absurd privilege of being a Visiting Artist with a group called Chulengo Expeditions on a backpacking trip through Chile's brand new Patagonia National Park. It was a predictably amazing experience, and it looked like this, this, and this. I'll be writing some music about it for the organization in the coming months. Chulengo does some really amazing work connecting people with this remarkable landscape, and you can read more about them at their website.

I've also been busy for totally different reasons! For most of the last year, I've been working as the touring keyboardist/accordionist for my good friends in a rock band called Ghost of Paul Revere; this has resulted in my spending a lot of my time running around the country looking like this and this while hanging out on cruise ships and stuff. I'll be working with the band through September, whereupon I'll hand off the reins to a very, very good harmonica player, but you can catch us in one of these places before then.

Some of you will remember that a few months ago, I had the chance to play a couple of shows with the amazing Maine Youth Rock Orchestra and Palaver Strings in Maine and Massachusetts. The good people at Herman Mantis just made an awesome new video of one of our performances of my song “Break,” and you can watch it here (or below). I'm very grateful to both of these remarkable ensembles for being so fun, humbling, and inspiring to work with — it’s great to watch this video and be reminded of what a blast it was to play this music with them:

Ah, to wrap this up, here's a great book of poems, and here's a song I've been totally obsessed with lately, and here's a new album I have not been disappointed by despite having looked forward to it for months. I've also been getting into all twelve million pages of these books after borrowing the first volume from my dad last month. Oh, and I finally got a Spotify account, so please let me know if there's any piece of music from the last 500 years that you think I should check out. (If you want to listen to my music there, you are encouraged to do so here, and obviously to do so as often as you possibly can.) 

Thanks very much for everything, as always, and I hope to see you all soon.

Yours,
Ben