$15 Cover @ the Door / Start 10:20pm / Doors 10pm / Standing Show
The green murmuring of dreams has long echoed through Miles Hewitt’s work, whether in poetry or song. After years leading Boston art-rock collective The Solars, whose EP Retitled Remastered landed on DigBoston’s Best Massachusetts Albums of 2017, Hewitt returned to Harvard College to finish his award-winning collection of poems “The Candle is Forever Learning to Sing.”
In 2018, Hewitt made for the sylvan Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, settling in a small hilltown just down the road from a friend’s recording studio and a few miles from where he’d spent his first year of life. It was there, amidst the cycling greens, browns, and blues, that the songs that would become Hewitt’s debut solo album, Heartfall, emerged. Drawing on British and American folk music, ‘70s songwriter rock, psychedelia, krautrock, and electronic music, Heartfall seeks what the late critic Ian MacDonald called “the chime.” It’s an album for album-lovers, redolent with longing and mystery, magic and dread, wielding the poet’s eye for enchantment, the musician’s ear for the unsayable, and the mystic’s heart of gold.
“Blow wind, blow rain / blow it all away,” Hewitt pleas on the haunting “Love Comes to Those Who Ask.” “I know you know how, just give me any other shape.” This is music on an elemental scale — cycles and wheels, warped and misused, recur, as do fires, rain, heavenly bodies, spirits, and dreams — with Hewitt’s unmistakable silvery voice smiling near the center.
instagram.com/milespeabodyhewitt
Rachel Sumner
With songs as sweet and biting as the nectar and venom in her voice, Rachel Sumner has been captivating audiences throughout the northeast for the last decade. She spent her early career on the bluegrass circuit, singing and writing with the genre-bending Boston group Twisted Pine. Since setting out on her own, Sumner's songs have been critically acclaimed, winning the Lennon Award in the folk category of the 2021 John Lennon Songwriting Contest for her song "Radium Girls (Curie Eleison);" earning her a spot in the Kerrville New Folk Competition; and being chosen two consecutive years by WBUR/NPR as one of the top Massachusetts entries in the Tiny Desk Competition.
facebook.com/rachelsumnermusic
John Shakespear
Photo credit: Tory Corless
Cambridge's John Shakespear has performed all around the United States, sharing the stage with acts such as Henry Jamison, Lewis del Mar, and members of Broken Social Scene. In 2019, he released his debut record, Spend Your Youth, produced by Devon Dawson (Local Natives) with additional mixing from Greg Giorgio (The National, The Head and the Heart). American Songwriter described the record as "reminiscent of Fleet Foxes and Elliott Smith,” and WBUR called it "an antidote to a dire national mood." Recorded in Nashville, Brooklyn, Boston, and CT, his forthcoming second record tells an album-length story, set amid the bars and basements of Boston's ever-changing music community.
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