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 Meg Hutchinson and Mark Erelli
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Live Music, Fine Arts Concert Series presents -
Meg Hutchinson and Mark Erelli
 Fellowship Hall at The Church at Lake Cherokee, 11968 FM 2011 East, Henderson, TX
Doors open at 7:00
Concert begins at 7:30
Tickets $25
Meg Hutchinson
Meg Hutchinson is an award-winning songwriter who artfully documents the human condition. With a poet’s ease, she makes the personal universal, allowing people’s stories to come alive through her unique vocals and haunting melodies.
“Called a “master of introspective ballads” (Performing Songwriter), award-winning acoustic songwriter Meg Hutchinson brings a poet’s sensibility to everyday scenes, painting a vivid picture of the way America lives today, giving us her most political and personal album to date – The Living Side.”
Meg Hutchinson is an award-winning songwriter who artfully documents the human condition. With a poet’s ease, she makes the personal universal, allowing people’s stories to come alive through her unique vocals and haunting melodies. Since the release of her Red House Records debut Come Up Full, she has won high praise for her songwriting and has been featured nationally on NPR Music, XM/Sirius Radio and several times on the syndicated show Mountain Stage. Publications like The Winnipeg Free Press have compared her songwriting with that of veterans Dar Williams, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Joni Mitchell.
Growing up in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, the woods and ponds were her childhood muses, as were songwriters like Greg Brown and Joni Mitchell, and poets like Mary Oliver, William Stafford, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost. When Hutchinson inherited her grandmother’s 1957 Martin guitar at age eleven, her love of words found an inspiring instrument, and there was no turning back. “Songwriting is not something I chose, I’ve just somehow always known that this is what I love to do. This is what I can’t help but do,” she says.
After graduating from college with a degree in creative writing, Hutchinson quit her longtime job on an organic lettuce farm and settled in Boston. In between gigs at pubs, coffeehouses and train stations, she won a Kerrville New Folk Award (2000) and was nominated for a Boston Music Award for her first studio album, Against the Grey.
She went on to win awards at the Rocky Mountain Folks Fest, the Telluride Troubadour Songwriter’s Showcase in Colorado and The Chris Austin Songwriting Contest at Merlefest in North Carolina, all in the course of a year, causing national publications like Performing Songwriter to take notice, calling her “A master of introspective ballads filled with understated yearning and an exquisite sense of metaphor.” She quickly became an integral part of the vibrant Boston songwriting community. Like every great performer who has come out of the Boston scene, Hutchinson took to the subway, performing in Park Street, Downtown Crossing and Davis Square stations–honing her chops in the same method of predecessors like Martin Sexton, John Mayer, Paula Cole and Tracy Chapman.
In the fall of 2009, Meg Hutchinson joined fellow songwriters Antje Duvekot, Anne Heaton and Natalia Zukerman to record the holiday EP Winterbloom: Traditions Rearranged. A collection of eclectic holiday and wintertime tunes, the CD features original and traditional songs from a variety of backgrounds–from a German hymn to a Yiddish folksong to a midwinter Greg Brown ballad.
Now, with the release of her new album The Living Side, Meg Hutchinson shows that she is a songwriter that has fully arrived. Combining her raw storytelling folk style with tasteful, intimate production, the album showcases her sweet, earthy vocals and her most powerful songwriting to date. It confirms that she is indeed one of the great voices of the next generation of acoustic musicians.
 Mark Erelli
“Mark Erelli embodies many of the best qualities of the folk-populist lineage that began with Woody Guthrie, and is carried today by Bruce Springsteen and others. His songs are unwaveringly and powerfully sincere, ….His voice, a beautiful combination of wine and whiskey, is as intimately conversational as a fireside chat." -SING OUT
“(Erelli's) warm embrace of the human spirit and the human experience is uplifting to the ear and to the soul...this is a jewel of a recording (Little Vigils).”
Discovered in an impromptu 3 am hotel room jam at a music conference when he was just 23, Erelli was finishing up a graduate degree in evolutionary biology when his self-titled debut was released in 1999. He hit the ground running when he won the prestigious Kerrville New Folk contest, joining the ranks of past winners such as Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith. With his sophomore release,
Erelli played 11 different instruments on Hope, ushering in the next stage in Erelli's startling musical evolution—multi-instrumentalist sideman. He quickly gained notoriety for his instrumental prowess when he joined Warner Brothers Recording Artist (and long-time friend) Lori McKenna's band. Erelli was by McKenna's side in front of 15,00 people each night when she opened for Tim McGraw and Faith Hill's Soul2Soul tour in 2007, as well as on televised appearances on the Grand Ole Opry and Good Morning America. More recently, Erelli accompanied Josh Ritter on a UK tour that culminated in a two-night stand at London's Royal Albert Hall.
Despite his burgeoning career as a sideman in the past few years, Erelli has continued to add to his own catalog with another trio of eclectic projects. In 2007 came Innocent When You Dream, a homespun acoustic collection of lullabies and love songs by Wilco, Townes VanZandt, and James Taylor, among others. Erelli then teamed up with producer Zack Hickman to explore modern times and matters of the heart with equal parts courage and compassion on 2008's Delivered. Employing new sonic textures like horns and keyboards, Delivered had a stark, muscular timelessness, embodying "the best qualities of the folk-populist lineage that began with Woody Guthrie, and is carried today by Bruce Springsteen (Sing Out!)." In 2009, Erelli was one of eight artists invited to the UK to write songs inspired by the life and work of Charles Darwin. After a week's composing, their eighteen new songs were debuted at a sold out concert. The resulting live recording, the Darwin Song Project, was hailed by The Guardian as "an intriguing, impressive album that results from a brave and unlikely collaboration."
Erelli will maintain his prolific streak in the coming year with two forthcoming releases. Seven Curses, a collection of murder ballads recorded with friend Jeffrey Foucault, and Little Vigils, Erelli's eighth studio album, are both scheduled for release in spring of 2010.
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