Spring Update & Upcoming Events

Hi everybody,

Greetings from New England, where everything is slowly shifting from cold to muddy. It's been a minute since I last wrote to all of you, and things have been busy around here! I wanted to alert you to a few upcoming events you might want to join me for in the coming days/weeks/months:

First: like anyone with deep interests in place, landscape, and rural New England, I've been a big fan of the writer Howard Mansfield for years. He's written about historical memory, the relationship between time and place, my favorite region in the country, and sheds, and his new book, which in part is about how human beings have an irrepressible urge to project meaning onto landscape, resonated especially strongly with me for all the reasons you might expect. I'm thrilled to report that Howard and I have gotten together to create a stage show, A Journey to the White Mountains in Words and Music, which combines excerpts from his new book with relevant pieces of music we plucked from across my five albums. It seemed like just a fun experiment at first, but we've both been surprised and delighted by how well the two elements complement each other, and are excited to present the show live. We'll be premiering it this Thursday, April 14th, at the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord, New Hampshire, and hope you can be there. Tickets and other info for that show are here.

I'll also be back in the Pacific Northwest later this year to teach a two-day workshop called "Reflecting Place with Music" at the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology, one of my favorite places on the planet. Registration for the workshop is live now here, and I can't encourage you enough to sign up -- no musical experience is required to participate, and teaching this thing has consistently been one of the most surprising, humbling, and edifying experiences I've had, each year that I've done it. (Also, as a bonus, it happens in one of the most staggeringly beautiful environments I've ever spent time in.) Hope that you can join us!

Stay tuned for more announcements in the near future -- I'll be heading to eastern Kansas later this month to build on the work I began out there during my Tallgrass residency last summer, and this summer includes a handful of other residencies and collaborations a bit farther afield that I'm very, very excited about. I've also got new music in the pipeline: I spent a productive few days in Tennessee this February recording a bunch of new sounds on one of my favorite pianos, and hope for some of those to see the light of day in the not-too-distant future.

Other stuff: my good friend (also named Ben) has a fantastic new book coming out this month about retracing a few of Henry David Thoreau's walks around New England (and I even have a cameo in one chapter!) -- you can/should preorder it here. Also, here's a free book about dirt road maintenance and construction that I recently read and was delighted by, here's a picture I took of a stream snaking through a salt marsh, and here's an old but recently-released recording of me and my friend Max playing a song together on banjo and piano in 2019. (In fact, I recently put together a playlist of some 80-ish songs by friends and colleagues of mine that I've had the pleasure of working on over the years -- you can check that out here.)

It's unbelievably nice to be performing regularly again, too: in the last couple months I've been able to return to a few of my favorite venues and visit a few exciting new ones. As always, all my upcoming solo shows are listed here, and I hope you all can make it to one of them sometime soon. And of course, please keep listening to The Trouble With Wilderness (which turns one year old later this month!) here, and/or purchase on CD or vinyl here.

Thanks once again for all your support. I miss you all, and hope to see you soon.

Yours,
Ben