2nd Annual Festival Supports Farmers, with Proceeds Benefiting Farm Aid, Rondout Valley Growers Association, Hudson Valley Center for Food, Culture & Agriculture
indie rock icons Blonde Redhead
the “forward-thinking music… bright, observant… sweet, jangly rock” (NPR Music) of Fruit Bats
WXPN-named “Artist to Watch” Slaughter Beach, Dog
Rhode Island’s longtime Newport Folk Fest favorites Deer Tick
NPR Tiny Desk concert alum and Hudson Valley artist Laura Stevenson
NYC garage rockers and Yep Roc artists Daddy Long Legs
Kentucky songwriter Joan Shelley
Lulu Lewis (former members of Tom Tom Club)
“intoxicating, ethereal” (Atwood Mag) Honeycrush
the psychedelic space rock of KidBess & The Magic Ring
Boston Music Award-nominated blues guitarist Ryan Lee Crosby
And a special guest to be announced at a later date.
Playlist of Meadowlark Festival performers.
Photos of Meadowlark Festival performers, venue, and logo assets.
Meadowlark 2024 tickets will be on sale on the festival website (meadowlarkfest.org) starting at 10:00AM ET on Tuesday, May 14th, and will be priced as follows:
1-Day General Admission: $70 tier 1 early bird / $100 day of
2-Day General Admission: $130 tier 1 early bird / $180 day of
1-Day VIP: $130 tier 1 early bird / $180 day of
2-Day VIP: $240 tier 1 early bird / $320 day of
Daily Parking: $10 tier 1 early bird / $20 day of
Friday 9/13 will be ticketed separately (lineup and ticket pricing TBA)
Meadowlark supports organizations that advocate for farmers in the Hudson Valley and nationally, and who are aligned with our values of promoting food security and advocacy for local farms. These organizations include Farm Aid, Rondout Valley Growers Association (RVGA), and Hudson Valley Center For Food, Culture & Agriculture. The festival takes place at Stone Ridge Orchard & Farmers Market, a 200-year-old working farm on 115 acres.
Over the course of ten albums, Blonde Redhead has earned praise from NPR Music (“awash in bittersweet melodies… vapors infused with tunes… music that’s both peaceful and endlessly adventurous”), NY Times (“subtly thrilling… [the band lets] the music swell until it reaches overwhelming crests”) and Pitchfork Media (“beautiful… a gorgeous achievement”).
A sense of place is a unifying theme Eric D. Johnson has revisited with Fruit Bats throughout its many lives. From the project’s origins in the late ’90s as a vehicle for Johnson’s lo-fi tinkering to the more sonically ambitious work of recent years, Fruit Bats has often showcased love songs where people and locations meld into one. It’s a loose song structure that navigates what he calls “the geography of the heart.”
Of Deer Tick, the New York Times opined, “The band is loud; it has maintained a kind of dogs-of-the-road work ethic in spite of periodic substance-related impairment; and it makes sincere, foursquare music with metaphor-packed lyrics such as the one that gives this movie its title.” Emotional Contracts, the latest full-length album from Deer Tick, catalogs all the existential casualties that accompany the passing of time, instilling each song with the irresistibly reckless spirit that’s defined the band for nearly two decades. Before heading into the studio with producer Dave Fridmann (The Flaming Lips, Spoon, Sleater-Kinney), the Providence-bred four-piece spent months working on demos in a perpetually flooded warehouse space in their hometown, enduring the busted heating system and massive holes in the roof as they carved out the album’s ten raggedly eloquent tracks. Emotional Contracts fully echoes the unruly energy of its creation, ultimately making for a heavy-hearted yet wildly life-affirming portrait of growing older without losing heart.
Of Slaughter Beach, Dog, Craig Finn wrote, “This sounds like a record we’ll listen to in ten years, twenty years, beyond… I’ve always admired Jake’s eye for detail, and it’s on full display here. It’s an album filled with gorgeous imagery and vivid worlds are built within each song. I see it all.” Influential radio station WXPN named the Pennsylvania band, an “Artist To Watch,” they performed at Newport Folk Fest, and have some 475,000 monthly listeners on Spotify,
Meadowlark will also feature local artisans, food vendors, award-winning artisanal hard apple ciders, and more with more details to be announced. Less than two hours north of New York City and a twenty-minute car ride from the Kingston Metro North railroad station, Stone Ridge Orchard and Farmers Market in the scenic Roundout Valley is situated between the Shawangunk Ridge and the Catskill mountain range in the Hudson Valley region.
Elizabeth Ryan, the owner of Stone Ridge Orchard and founding farmer of Breezy Hill Orchard, was named the Dutchess Putnam Westchester Farm Bureau 2023 Farmer of the Year. She has been honored as a Farmer Hero by Farm Aid and recognized for her leadership in agriculture by the Rondout Valley Growers Association. Meadowlark is proud to be affiliated with Stone Ridge Orchard and these organizations who are playing a critical role in advocating for farmers in the Hudson Valley region and around the country. Elizabeth was recently awarded the prestigious Apple Advocate Award, a lifetime achievement award from the American Cider Association.
Stone Ridge Orchard’s intimate Cider Tasting Room will feature The Writers Room presented by Keepsake House, a NYC women-owned artist collective known for their roundtable shows where emerging artists share the stage and create community, including a recent performance at City Winery NYC.
Meadowlark producer and Modrocker Productions, LLC founder Daniel Leslie hails from Dutchess County, graduated from Poughkeepsie’s Vassar College, and now resides in Brooklyn. Leslie and Ryan attended Farm Aid festival last year and presented the organization with a donation in-person.
Past iterations of Meadowlark have featured DeVotchKa, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Chris Smither, Jeffrey Lewis, R.L. Boyce, The Detroit Cobras, Babehoven, Jolie Holland, Lizzie No, and Kaia Kater.
Farm Aid’s mission is to build a vibrant, family farm-centered system of agriculture in America. Farm Aid artists and board members Willie Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp, Dave Matthews and Margo Price host an annual festival to raise funds to support Farm Aid’s work with family farmers and to inspire people to choose family farm food. For more than 35 years, Farm Aid, with the support of the artists who contribute their performances each year, has raised more than $78 million to support programs that help farmers thrive, expand the reach of the Good Food Movement, take action to change the dominant system of industrial agriculture and promote food from family farms.
Laura Stevenson’s self-titled 2021 album follows Stevenson’s 2019 career milestone The Big Freeze, celebrated for its “finely detailed, wrenchingly intimate songwriting” (All Songs Considered), and a 2020 NPR Tiny Desk (counted as one of the year’s 20 Best). Produced by John Agnello (Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Kurt Vile,) at The Building in Marlboro, NY, Laura Stevenson is an altogether beautiful record, a sincere portrait of a human heart in all its vibrant colors. More than anything, it is about bearing one’s whole self in the face of those you love—uncomfortable, and exposed, but vital, present.
New York City’s most beloved blues bashers Daddy Long Legs have been huffing and puffing and blowing houses down on a nightly basis on their infinite world tour and always bring an elevated level of rough and ready intensity to contemporary lo-fi blues with their explosive fire ceremony! Rolling Stone likened them to “Chicago blues fired at the moon, played by the demented children of the Pretty Things.” Esquire called them “drunken cowboys with fuzzy mics and rip-roaring harmonica solos.”
Rolling Stone said, “If Nick Drake and Sandy Denny had had a kid, she may have grown up to be Joan Shelley.” Shelley is a songwriter and singer from Louisville, KY. She draws inspiration from traditional and traditionally-minded performers from her native Kentucky, as well as those from Ireland, Scotland, and England, but she’s not a folksinger. Her disposition aligns more closely with that of, say, Roger Miller, Dolly Parton, or her fellow Kentuckian Tom T. Hall, who once explained—simply, succinctly, in a song—“I Witness Life.” She has opened for Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Wilco, Chris Smither, Andrew Bird, and Richard Thompson.
What began as the solo project of New York singer-songwriter Alexandra Antonopoulos, Honeycrush has evolved into a four-piece rock band comprising Antonopoulos (vocals, guitar), Pat Butler (bass), Chris Wall (drums) and Phil Shore (guitar, modular synth, piano). Atwood Magazine called Honeycrush “haunting and fragile… intoxicating, ethereal indie folk… hypnotically seductive… soul-stirring.” An EP of three stripped back songs titled The Drowning Room, was released March 8.
Aquarium Drunkard called Ryan Lee Crosby’s music “sometimes light and free-flowing, sometimes intense and heavy.” The songwriter/guitarist may be from Boston, MA, but his musical home is in Mississippi. Fans can journey there either to see him at festivals or figuratively by listening to his new album Winter Hill Blues, produced at Delta-Sonic Sound in Memphis, TN by Bruce Watson, of Fat Possum, who produced all-time great albums by R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough. Crosby has befriended GRAMMY-nominee Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, last purveyor of the Bentonia, MS style of blues featuring minor-key, open-tuned guitars and falsetto singing, most exemplified by Skip James. Guitar Player Magazine spotlighted Crosby in an article on James and the Bentonia style. He has earned spotlights in Guitar Player, WBUR (Boston NPR station), Smithsonian Mag, Premier Guitar, It’s Psychedelic Baby Mag, American Blues Scene, Vintage Guitar Magazine, and landed him atop the Roots Music Report radio chart at #1. This year, he will perform at Juke Joint Festival in Clarksdale, MS and Bentonia Blues Festival in Bentonia, MS with a phalanx of Mississippi blues artists.
Lulu Lewis is the creation of Dylan Hundley on vocals and videos and sometimes synths and Pablo Martin on guitar, synths, bass and electro oddities. Previous (and current) projects they have be involved in include – Whit Stillman’s film Metropolitan, Tom Tom Club and The Du Rites. Guest musicians on the project have included Sergio Rotman (Los Fabulosos Cadillacs), Brendan Canty (Fugazi),and Jay Dee Daugherty (Patti Smith Group).
KidBess & The Magic Ring is a five-piece psychedelic rock band from upstate New York. Led by songwriter KidBess, (Bess Greenberg), the Binghamton-based band pushes boundaries of genre, channeling the spirit of groups such Pink Floyd, and Jefferson Airplane, while maintaining their own timeless and innovative sound. Featuring powerhouse vocals, cello, two guitars, electric bass and drums, the band’s intoxicating blend of intimate introspective lyricism, sonic layering, textured sound effects, and resilient emotive strength have enabled them to carve out their own unique space within the contemporary collection of heart and mind-expanding music.
Greenberg’s raspy timbre, rooted in the bluesy tradition of Grace Slick and Janis Joplin, adds a layer of grit and intensity to the sound of their ethereal soundscapes, exhibiting a level of emotional depth and authenticity rarely seen in contemporary times — and at moments can be referred to as “poetic punk”; unified dynamics is where the band truly shines as a unit. The vocal is cradled, harmonized and complemented by the haunting brilliant swells of “The Magic Ring”: cellist Jeff McAuley, guitarist Joe Alston, bassist Mike Amadeo and drummer Moses Valle. The band weaves a textured web of emotive sonic waves that amplify Greenberg’s intimate genuine words; melted together, the sound will hold you close, rock your core and send chills down your spine.
About Keepsake House
Women and Asian American-owned soon-to-be non-profit Keepsake House was founded by musician Jasmine Jang and event manager Hailey Savage with the mission to create a safe, supportive space for artists to share their work and nurture meaningful artist-audience connection. Keepsake House produces and hosts an annual artist residency program, 5-10 roundtable shows per year, and monthly Open Mics. Audiences call their shows “brilliant and powerful,” and one Keepsake House Artist in Residence said, “the feeling after being in a Keepsake show is one of empowerment and purpose.”
