When:May 26, 2022
Time:7:00 pm - 9:30 pm
Where:eTOWN HALL / 1535 Spruce Street, Boulder, CO 80302
Cost:$26GA + Applicable Fees
Doors:6:00 pm
Show:7:00 pm
Buy Tickets

If Darlingside’s first album, Birds Say (2015), focused on the past through nostalgia, and their second, Extralife (2018), contemplated uncertain futures, Fish Pond Fishstands firmly in the present, looking at what’s here, now. Dave Senft (bass), Don Mitchell (guitar, banjo), Auyon Mukharji (violin, mandolin), and Harris Paseltiner (cello, guitar) have created a natural history in song—taking us into gardens, almond groves, orchard rows, down to the ocean floor and under stars.

The band has long been praised for their harmonies and intelligent songwriting, described by NPR as “exquisitely-arranged, literary-minded, baroque folk-pop,” and their dynamic presence (crowded tightly together onstage) have made them a live-performance favorite. But this album showcases their broader storytelling abilities: nature is a looking glass, the songs suggest, with tracks like Ocean Bed, Green + Evergreen, Mountain + Sea, and Crystal Caving making metaphors of their titles. An experience of nature is an experience of self; an experience of self is one of natural change cut and complemented by stasis.

The band started studio recording Fish Pond Fish in late 2019, when they moved into Tarquin Studios—the residential studio of Grammy Award-winning producer Peter Katis (Interpol, The National). Living and working together brought them to their very early years under one roof in Hadley, Massachusetts, which had seeded the origins of their intimate collaboration. At Katis’s suggestion, many components of the initial demos were preserved as layers in the produced tracks to retain the spirit of the initial recordings, resulting in a collection of songs that is simultaneously the most bedroom-tracked and production-heavy full-length album that the band has yet released.

 

Opening for Darlingside: Dori Freeman

Dori Freeman’s inimitable signature sound is in peak form on her fourth studio album, Ten Thousand Roses. Raised among a family of musicians in the Blue Ridge Mountains and hailed by Rolling Stone as “one of the most authentic vocalists to emerge from the hills of southwestern Virginia in recent years,” she’s a bonafide Appalachian artist, while simultaneously shattering the archetype by empowering the characters in her songs with personal strength and homegrown wisdom. Through this process, she both defies and expands notions of what it means to be from the region.

Ten Thousand Roses follows three widely acclaimed records produced by Teddy Thompson, one of which produced “You Say,” which continues to find fans, steadily climbing toward six million streams on Spotify, largely by word of mouth. Freeman has been praised by outlets such as NPR, Rolling Stone and The New York Times, but has chosen to remain outside of Nashville literally and figuratively. She lives in Galax, Virginia, where she says she’s been better able to develop her music in a truer way to her personally.  “I’ve never been drawn to living in the city as much as I love visiting them. I prefer a rural, small town life,” says Freeman. She also believes that living apart from the industry frees her from the pressure to fit current ideas of what a genre should sound like. “I just make music I like and hope other people will like it, too.”  

Presented by

Boulder Arts Commission