$10 Cover @ the Door / Start 7:45pm / Doors 7:30pm
Lindsey Sampson, Rick Drost, and host John O’Leary will perform their most popular songs (and tell a few tales).
Lindsey Sampson
Lindsey Sampson blends quiet morning folk with Southern stomp & holler for a sound with depth and energy. Hailing from New England, she draws from nature and folklore to create songs with soul and simplicity. When not playing solo, she plays in her band Visiting Wine, whose self-titled album was released last July.
Rick Drost
Rick Drost writes and sings songs with depth and heart, songs that repay repeated listening and convey a long love of classical music, natural wonders, and poetry. His songs treat life from varied angles—jilted lovers, swans in the Public Garden, leftover lobsters, and meditations on meditation! Rick grew up playing classical piano in a musical family outside Buffalo, NY, and discovered a love of poetry (especially Gerard Manley Hopkins) in high school. Early influences were Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, who inspired him with her lyrics and alternate tunings. More recent influences include Vance Gilbert and David Wilcox, who calls Drost's song "Turning the World" simply “the greatest song ever written!”
Rick’s CD of the same name, released in 2017, charted on the Folk DJ list in its first month, and continues to get airplay from Europe across America to New Zealand. To keep pace Rick has traveled to coffeehouses, house concerts, mall festivals, and Folk Alliance Events from New England to Colorado to the Southeast. According to No Depression (the pre-eminent journal of roots music) Rick’s musical approach invites comparisons to “Tom Rush, Tom Paxton, and John Sebastian.”
John O’Leary
John O’Leary, has played in a dozen folk, rock, or honky-tonk bands over the course of his career, fronting many of them as a singer/songwriter/pianist. He has opened shows for over two dozen Rock & Roll Hall of Fame acts—including Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, The Grateful Dead, Sly and the Family Stone, Bo Diddley, and Muddy Waters—and appeared on NBCs Midnight Special with Wolfman Jack. He has performed in top venues on both coasts, from The Hollywood Bowl and Troubadour in LA to the Bitter End in New York.
In the late 70s and 80s his unusual campaign for Governor of Connecticut and then for US President paved the way for a new breed of political candidate—one unencumbered by facts or knowledge—to aspire to higher office. He reluctantly accepts full responsibility for the current state of national affairs.
These days John performs primarily as a singer-songwriter on the local contemporary folk scene. On warm weekends he can occasionally be found in the Boston Public Garden playing bottle-neck slide guitar—with or without the bottle—for music lovers of all ages and species.