Volcanoes, New Shows, and Other Recent Events

Hello!

It's been a busy year and a little while since I've written to you all, but I felt I should send a quick note to catch up and alert you to some upcoming solo shows at a few of my favorite spots in New England, starting tonight in Burlington:

12/14 BURLINGTON, VT
Radio Bean, 9:45pm

12/15 CAMBRIDGE, MA
Club Passim (opening for GoldenOak), 7pm
tickets here

1/19 LYME, NH
Lyme Congregational Church, 6:30pm

1/20 PORTLAND, ME
One Longfellow Square (co-bill with Honeysuckle), 8pm
tickets here

1/28 KEENE, NH
Nova Arts (co-bill with Hiroya Tsukamoto), 7pm

2/18 NORTHAMPTON, MA
The Parlor Room (co-bill with Eleanor Buckland), 7:30pm
tickets here

More will be added to that list in the coming weeks, of course, but tickets are starting to move quickly for a couple of those shows and I wanted to make sure you all knew about them in time. As always, ticketing info and other details about all my solo performances can always be found at bencosgrove.com/shows.

- - -
 

I suppose a lot has been happening since I last wrote, so at the risk of testing your attention span, I'll hit you quickly with some highlights:

- I spent a bunch of the summer exploring, learning about, and writing music about volcanoes, first in California with a team of scientists from NASA (more on this later) and then on an artist residency in Hawaii where I spent a lot of time chasing down places where the presence of brand-new land is strikingly obvious.

- While there I played a show in my 49th state! Now the only US state I haven't yet played in is Delaware, which for some reason feels just about as satisfying as if I'd played in all 50.

- I released a new collaborative EP with my friend Max García Conover in July, which is made up of a handful of songs we've helped each other out with for years but never really found a home on either of our solo releases -- we've both been delighted to finally have these songs out in the world. (It even includes the only song with words that I've ever written, which of course is about, you know, mapmaking and Moby Dick.)

- I gave a series of fun joint performances with the writer Howard Mansfield, which combined some of my music with parts of an essay of his about the historic search for meaning and place in the White Mountains. We have one more show together in Keene, NH in April of 2023, and we're excited for that one; the whole project has been a blast to work on.

- I returned to eastern Kansas to write more music about the Flint Hills and at one point had a performance disrupted by a nearby tornado.

- I joined up with my old friends Ghost of Paul Revere for a bunch of their final concerts around the country, which were bittersweet but extremely enjoyable.

- I returned to the Pacific Northwest for a minute this fall to play some concerts and to teach a two-day workshop about music & landscape to a great group of students on the Oregon coast. 

- I also saw some nice mountains along the way.

- As usual, I played a bunch of shows all over the place, but it was only at one of them that I arrived to find that someone there had made cookies with pictures of me on them. 

- I gave a pair of concerts in New Hampshire on a 1790s pianoforte that at one point had belonged to the Alcott family! The thrill of playing such a historic instrument was balanced out pretty nicely by the terror of playing something so unfamiliar to a crowded hall of listeners. A little like drag racing in a delicate and painstakingly restored antique car.

- (I also wrote and recorded a whole new album's worth of music, which I look forward to telling you much more about in 2023...)


More on that last one later, but in the meantime, I hope the holidays are good to you all, and that I'll cross paths with most of you soon. If you're scrambling for gift ideas, I of course humbly recommend various CDs, LPs, stickers, and such over here (and I've got a big pile of winter-themed music I recorded a few years ago that you're welcome to enjoy here).

Miss you all, and see you soon -- perhaps at one of the shows mentioned at the top!

All best, and thanks, as always, for your support,
Ben