Hogfarm Studios Annex, Biddeford, ME
Hogfarm Studios is a community arts space and bar created by a couple we’re lucky enough to call friends. Gil and Coco Corral are a fun, artistic couple who have created a happening arts scene out of thin air. It started as a house concert series in a barn attached to their home and has now blossomed to a beautiful venue in the heart of Biddeford.
After a late start, we arrived just in time at Hogfarm to catch a magical performance by our friends in Wooden Dinosaur (Michael Roberts & Katie Trautz) who played acoustically in the center of the room with the audience circled around them, listening with bated breath.
Staying with Gil and Coco after the show was a real treat unto itself, from the bottomless tequila bottle to the 2:00 a.m. quesadillas to the hours of laughter and good conversation. This joyous evening was followed by a morning of more wonderful food and Jiro’s first trampoline experience with six-year-old Chloe.
The Red Door
After a wonderful private party on Sunday for a dear friend of ours, we headed back north up the coast, this time to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. We did a fun interview and in-studio performance with Terry Blake at 106.1 FM, a great community radio station in Portsmouth. We were thrilled to have friends up from Boston and Durham for the show.
A year ago we met Andrew when we were opening for The Avett Brothers out on Martha’s Vineyard. He really pulled through and brought out a bunch of friends to fill up The Red Door. Suz learned a new “whoot-whoot” whistle and Dave got re-introduced to stick shift driving. All in all, it was a great stop on the tour.
The Starving Artist
We had been meaning to get out to The Starving Artist Collective for some time and were thrilled to finally make our way there as part of the Carpenter Bird Tour. We played the set unplugged, which is always a great way to connect with a new audience. Fortunately, The Starving Artist was the perfect type of intimate venue for an acoustic show.
The next day we found ourselves in Brattleboro, exploring the city, checking out a painting exhibit by the very talented David Brewster (who David knows from Deep Springs College), eating at the farmer’s market where we heard beautiful kora music and where we got a fresh poem written for us for $1 by M Hayden, a vagabond poet with a typewriter perched on a crate (poem reproduced in full below).
The Monkey House
The show at the Monkey House was a great success thanks in large part to the full attendance of the UVM Field Naturalist department. Our friends Zack and Corey had recently relocated to Burlington where Zack is studying at UVM, and it was a joy to see them, meet their friends, and spend the next day on their back porch, enjoying the last thralls of summer. The highlight of the performance for us was definitely stepping out from behind the mics for an acoustic encore of “Give Your Love.”
Langdon Street Café
We finally met The Accident That Led Me To The World at the Langdon Street Café, a band who has been playing lots of the same venues as us over the last two years, especially within the last couple of weeks on tour, where it felt like they were just at our heels and gaining at every venue.
Once we started tuning up for our performance, David realized he had lost a piece (a saddle block) for his guitar the night beforee. Jiro went looking for a replacement and after digging around outside luckily found a pebble that he carved to work as a makeshift saddle block for the G-string on David’s guitar.
Although sometimes our audiences are hesitant to get up and start dancing to the festive Mexican-infused songs of our repertoire, a little girl at Langdon had no such hesitations and performed a beautiful dance routine in front of the stage as we played through fast and slow songs.
We topped off a great evening by driving out to our friend Katie’s mountaintop cabin where we stargazed from her roof.
Firehouse 13
After a full afternoon back in Cambridge, complete with a radio interview, an oil change, a guitar drop-off to Yukon Stubblebine for a quick, professional fix to the saddle block problem, and several loads of laundry, we made our way down to Providence, Rhode Island for a performance at Firehouse 13 with Ben Pilgrim, Tallahassee, and Joe Fletcher. Firehouse 13 is an old fire station that has now been converted to an art gallery and performance space. We played to a packed room, which was a stark and amazing contrast to our last performance in Providence, where we played to an audience of five (one of whom was our bass player’s girlfriend). We hope to get back to Providence soon!
