Tickets On Sale Tomorrow
Meadowlark – a new musical festival set to launch to the public this September 8-10 in the Hudson Valley – has revealed its inaugural lineup, blending some of the most storied names in Americana, indie rock, and experimental music with a roster of local and emerging artists. The venue, Stone Ridge Orchard & Farmers Market, is a 200-year-old working farm on 115 acres and will showcase artists within a secluded and intimate setting. Tickets go on sale tomorrow.
Saturday’s lineup features Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, about which Pitchfork said, “musically adventurous… melodic, exuberant indie rock… restless, combustible songs as elastic and exaggerated as his voice.” DeVotchka – the “striking… attention grabbing” (NY Times), GRAMMY-nominated band—headlines on Sunday. Also performing are:
* Chris Smither (about whom the NY Times said, “with a weary, well-traveled voice and a serenely intricate finger-picking style, Mr. Smither turns the blues into songs that accept hard-won lessons and try to make peace with fate”);
* Chris Staples (who has over a million monthly listeners on Spotify);
* New Orleans cult favorites Quintron & Miss Pussycat;
* Hudson Valley’s own Babehoven, whose “bedroom rock charts attraction, loneliness, neuroses, and late capitalism in winsome, pointillist detail” (Pitchfork);
* the “immediately arresting voice… that lands halfway between dusty rural Americana and grimy New York art-rock” (NPR Music) of Jolie Holland;
* Lizzie No, who “is a magnetic performer and a rising star in the folk world [because she is] writing songs that are tender, incisive, gentle and intense, all at the same time” (NPR World Cafe);
* blues guitarist Ryan Lee Crosby, who is mentored by GRAMMY-nominated Mississippi bluesman Jimmy “Duck” Holmes and has been spotlighted in Aquarium Drunkard, WBUR (Boston NPR station), Smithsonian Mag, Acoustic Guitar Mag;
* one of NYLON Magazine’s “favorite cool girls,” Brooklyn’s beccs;
* and Atwood Mag “artist to watch” Cloudbelly.
Learn more, embeddable video, event logos, high res photos of performers, etc.:
https://meadowlarkfest.com/press-kit
Meadowlark will also feature local artisans, food trucks, and more.
WHO: DeVotchka, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Chris Smither, Quintron & Miss Pussycat, Jolie Holland, Chris Staples, Ryan Lee Crosby, Babehoven, Lizzie No, beccs, Cloudbelly
WHAT: New music festival Meadowlark, open to the public for the first time, presented by Modrocker Productions
WHEN: September 8-10, 2023
WHERE: Stone Ridge Orchard & Farmers Market, 3012 NY-213, Stone Ridge, NY 12484
TICKETS: https://meadowlarkfest.com
Born out of a close-knit network of local and traveling musicians, Meadowlark 2022 featured Mississippi bluesman RL Boyce and NYC singer/songwriter Jeffrey Lewis, among others, at an invitation-only two-day performance in a sun-soaked rolling meadow among the apple trees in Stone Ridge last August. Now Meadowlark will be open to the public for the first time this summer.
Less than two hours north of New York City, 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.
Meadowlark producer and Modrocker Productions, LLC founder Daniel Leslie, who hails from Hopewell Junction, graduated from Vassar College, and now resides in Brooklyn, describes its inspiration: “This grew out of a vision shared with some of my musician friends about blending traditional and experimental music in a special, secluded setting,” he said. “The Hudson Valley is such an epicenter of music culture, it’s the perfect setting for this type of experience we wanted to create that blends traditional music with an edgier counterculture vibe.”
About DeVotchKa
NPR Music said, “Tore my heart up… brilliant… lovely… timeless… Its sound remains totally original and truly the band’s own — the flavors of Eastern Europe, dusty desert roads, Mexico and flamenco. Moody and triumphant at the same time, the sound is totally organic, with real strings, real brass, real percussion and real handclaps.”
A cross-pollination of numerous influences, including cabaret, spaghetti Westerns, norteño, punk, and the immigrant dance music of Eastern Europe, Colorado-based quartet DeVotchKa, formed in Denver by multi-instrumentalists Nick Urata (vocals, guitar, trumpet), Tom Hagerman (violin, accordion), Jeanie Schroder (sousaphone, bass) and percussionist Shawn King, emerged as unlikely indie heroes in the mid-2000s infusing modern indie music with a global flavor.
They found widespread success in 2006 with their Grammy-nominated soundtrack to the hit indie film Little Miss Sunshine. Signing with revered indie, Anti-, the band delivered A Mad and Faithful Telling in early 2008, reaching the number nine slot on the Billboard Heatseekers chart. A lengthy world tour followed, including stops at major festivals like Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, and Bumbershoot. After doing more soundtrack work, this time for the 2009 comedy I Love You Phillip Morris, the group returned to the studio for 2011’s moody and triumphant 100 Lovers. Embarking on another world tour, they collaborated with the Colorado Symphony on the 2012 concert album Live with the Colorado Symphony. Over the next several years, Urata became increasingly involved in his own film composition career, scoring movies like Crazy Stupid Love, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Paddington, and the Netflix series A Series of Unfortunate Events. Meanwhile, the band regrouped for a lengthy recording session, eventually returning in 2018 with their sixth album, This Night Falls Forever, this time via Concord Records.
About Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
In any discussion regarding songwriters and lyricists of 21st century indie music, Alec Ounsworth and his moniker, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, will feature prominently. Few have been as consistently brilliant, eclectic, and intimate; fewer still remain defiantly independent, refusing to sign deals that compromise artistic vision. That is what characterizes Ounsworth’s oeuvre, especially the lifetime project he initiated sometime in the early 2000s, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. And with each release since its landmark self-titled debut, he has refined and broadened his sound, indulging an ever wider set of influences.
Prolific and enigmatic as ever, his recent works marry the quirky, left-field spirit of the early years with a well-earned confidence, and grander sense of scale and ambition. Always heading down new avenues of song arrangement and organic connection to his audience, after nearly two decades Ounsworth remains one of music’s most distinctive voices.
About Chris Smither
Chris Smither has been deemed one of the absolute best singer songwriters in the world (Associated Press). Fans from around the world continue to fill concert venue after concert venue eager for the galvanizing ride of a Chris Smither concert. Reviewers including the Associated Press, NPR, MOJO, and The New York Times agree that Chris remains a significant songwriter and an electrifying guitarist as he draws deeply from folk and blues, modern poets and philosophers. He continues to showcase his music and lyrics to extraordinary effect; that strength compounds strength, leaving the listener feeling touched by grace, or an almost otherworldly wisdom.
About Quintron & Miss Pussycat
Quintron and Miss Pussycat have been making genre-defying noise and hard rocking dance music in New Orleans for over fifteen years. The majority of their 14 full-length albums have the psychedelic soul of traditional New Orleans party music filtered through a tough distorted Hammond B-3 and a cache of self-made electronic instruments.
Miss Pussycat plays maracas and sings, as well as entertaining all age groups with her highly amusing technicolor puppet shows.
Hers are complex puppet shows beautifully crafted for success in intimate venues of late night drinking and dancing: tactile, idiosyncratic characters, pithy dialogue, electronically pixilated soundtracks, and trippy black light effects create a visual and engaging overture/finale to Quintron and Miss Pussycat’s music sets. Quintron aids in puppet manipulation and voicing. Miss Pussycat, in turn, sings lead and back-up and plays maracas during Quintron’s performances.
Quintron has released strange soundscapes based on inner-city field recordings of frogs and neighborhood ambiance as well as holing himself up in The New Orleans Museum Of Art for three months to create the epic “Sucre Du Sauvage” (2011, Goner Records). In addition to his own recordings, Quintron has played organ on a number of other records, most notably The Oblivions’ ‘9 Songs’ and Steve Riley And The Mamou Playboys “Grand Isle” which was nominated for a Grammy in 2012 and featured the Quintron penned song “Chatterbox.”
About Jolie Holland
Over the span of her career, Jolie Holland has knotted together a century of American song—jazz, blues, soul, rock and roll—into some stew that is impossible to categorize with any conventional critical terminology. This is her burden and her gift, to know all of these American songs of the last ten decades in her head and her heart, and to have to wrestle with their legacy. She dives straight to the pathos of a song the way the very greatest singers, singers like Mavis Staples, or Al Green, or Skip James, or Tom Waits do. Upon first encounter her songs seem challenging, perhaps unsettling at times, but as so many poets and rockers have shown us (from Dante Alighieri to William Blake to Sylvia Plath to Patti Smith to Nick Cave to Mark E. Smith) that’s where the beauty lies. As evident on her first recordings, Holland apparently has no fear of the truth, and there is no emotional core that she cannot reach in song. In fact she thrives on the red hot center of a musical composition, in all its strange and brutal detail. Note how easily the line “I’ve been taken outside and I’ve been brutalized” trips off her tongue in Joe Tex’s “The Love You Save.”
About Chris Staples
Chris Staples is master of the pared-down lyric. Chris Staples has driven a steady Econoline through the last 25 odd years of indie rock, building a catalog of understated gems and gathering listeners to his cause. There are no direct answers here, but the song’s very existence might provide a way forward. In times of dislocation, movement is key. Explore anything outside of ourselves, make something exist with our hands, listen to the new and strange, get off the bed and shake ourselves out. Then perhaps with time and repetition we will fade back into our own skin, recede into ourselves, start to be on it.
About Babehoven
Maya Bon, the singer-songwriter behind Hudson, New York’s Babehoven, views light as one of life’s few fundamental truths. In times of pain, we often look to simple things we can rely on, and light is as reliable as they come. Babehoven’s first full-length album Light Moving Time (out Oct 28, 2022 on Double Double Whammy) revolves around Bon’s view of life as a confusing, jarring, and kaleidoscopic experience filled with contradictions, loss, and change, so it’s no wonder Bon often looks to light — not so much for specific answers, but as a pillar of continuity and a marker of time.
Bon has built a solid partnership with her musical collaborator and producer Ryan Albert over the last few years, releasing several EPs together since 2018. Their work displays Bon’s emotionally incisive approach to songwriting that draws just as much power from abstract poetry that asks big questions as specific, personal vignettes. Similarly, Light Moving Time rests on lyrics that zoom in and out, inviting listeners to bring their own experiences to these songs when her writing is more cryptic, and stew in the moments when Bon presents her entire heart on a platter.
About Lizzie No
New York singer-songwriter, harpist and guitarist Lizzie No is one of the most exciting new voices in contemporary Americana music. Her 2017 debut album, ‘Hard Won,’ was hailed as “simultaneously understated and fervent” by Billboard Magazine. No’s 2019 album, “Vanity”, was a hit at college radio stations across the country, cracking the NACC Top Adds Chart. Rolling Stone Magazine called the first single, ‘Narcissus,’ a “crisp alt-rock gem” and a ‘Song You Need To Know.’ After dropping a surprise home-studio-made EP in 2020, Lizzie is currently working on her third studio album and sharing music and writing with her loyal subscriber base. This summer she joins the Basic Folk podcast team as guest cohost.
About Ryan Lee Crosby
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.
About Beccs
beccs is a Brooklyn-based indie pop artist hailed as one of NYLON Magazine’s “favorite cool girls,” A John Lennon Songwriting Finalist, and an “indie-pop vocalist of astonishing candor” by the HuffPost. Holding up a mirror to herself and society at large, beccs confronts and heals audiences with a soul-stirring voice that is as dynamic as it is vulnerable. The indie pop artist has been critically acclaimed by Refinery29, NYLON, AudioFemme, Huffington Post Queer Voices, Popdust, LADYGUNN and featured on The BUILD Series with Monet X Change from RuPaul’s Drag Race for her queer-inclusive Christmas music video “Before This Christmas Ends” as well as her climate protest song “Such A Love” which beccs self-produced in 2020 with violinist Godfrey Furchtgott (Demi Lovato, Tones and I, Happiest Season soundtrack).
About Coudbelly
Cloudbelly is the moniker of great falls, MA based singer-songwriter corey laitman. among the newest members of the signature sounds family, laitman’s poetic lyricism, stirring vocals and disarming stage presence have earned them a strong and growing following in the pioneer valley and beyond. they are accompanied by a rotating cast of inspired instrumentalists and friends. Atwood Magazine called them an Artist To Watch, continuing, “A moving display of fragility and surrender, Cloudbelly’s debut single ‘Up in Smoke’ weaves wondrous and haunting indie folk into a seismic outpouring of intimate emotion.”
About Stone Ridge Orchard
The land that is now Stone Ridge Orchard has been a productive, diversified farm for nearly two hundred years. Tucked away in the Roundout River Valley between the Shawangunk Ridge and Catskill Mountains, they raise a wide variety of sustainably-grown gourmet fruits and vegetables on 115 scenic rolling acres.
The performance site will be under the shade of the farm’s iconic nearly 400-year-old oak tree, the jewel of Stone Ridge, next to a stand of some of the oldest apple trees in the region: McIntosh, Cortland, Golden Delicious, and Stayman.
In 2008, Elizabeth Ryan of Breezy Hill Orchard took over management of the orchard at Stone Ridge. Since then, Elizabeth has taken great care to give trees the care they need to produce flavorful, high-quality fruit. Breezy Hill Orchard sells fruit from Stone Ridge Orchard, as well as a large line of artisan baked goods and cider, at more than 20 farmers’ markets in New York.
