SEPTEMBER NEWSLETTER

PASSIM // EGREMONT // PATREON

September goes off like an alarm clock, cutting through the floppy, gooey, swampy brain-haze of August. Suddenly it’s Go Time: the season to bring in the harvest, hunt for mushrooms, make pickles, make jam, get the kid back in school, get the sweaters out of the basement, make soup, and establish which creative projects the fall will revolve around.

Usually, it’s also the time to dust off the flight case and head back out on the road, but this year it seems that touring will continue to be minimal. It’s a drag any way you look at it. We did launch into an optimistic flurry of booking in the middle of the summer, but then quickly backpedaled as things started looking iffier and iffier out there. At the moment, I have a handful of things booked through the end of the year, all of them teetering on the edge of viability, but I’m hoping for the best. September, though, has two shows that feel solid, so let’s focus on them for now!

September 25 I’ll play at Club Passim, my first show featuring walls AND a roof AND an audience in 18 months. It feels significant and symmetrical to return to playing indoors at Passim, since I was last booked to play there March 13 2020, aka The Day Shit Got Real. I ended up live-streaming that show from home, which I didn’t know how to do, and now I can’t wait to play the room again in person, which I may or may not still know how to do. Please note that ALL Club Passim performances require proof of vax and a mask to attend. You can read the full club policy here. 

September 30, I’m at The Egremont Barn in South Egremont, MA. I do love a barn show; this one will take place outdoors next to the barn, but that’s just as good. This venue is new to me and while it's only a couple hours from my house, at this point driving the winding road into the Berkshires passes for an adventure. I’m looking forward to exotic flora and fauna, and encountering a foreign people and their mysterious ways.

In the absence of robust fall touring, I’ll be doing my best to make and share music, however possible. I’ll crank back up the livestreams next month, which, while not a replacement for in-person shows do have their own beauty, and I find they help maintain a feeling of connection. There’s a few old records still left to play through, and I’ll dive back in starting with Blood Test, in October. There’s also a queue of new recording projects over here, and at least one of them will make the move to the front burner. More on all of this as the fall proceeds.

Meanwhile, I’m keeping up a steady stream of freshly-learned covers, recent songlets, and assorted show-and-tells on the creative process for my crew on Patreon: a sweet community of thoughtful, interesting, devastatingly attractive people (I’m going on faith about this last thing but I’m sure I’m not wrong). It’s of course helpful to have a trickle of income during this challenging chapter, but I’m finding it’s also really nice to have a group of people to have to show up for and interact with on a regular basis. You can sign onto this excursion for any amount per month, starting at 3 bucks.

JF and I played the Green River Festival a couple weeks ago, with Moses on bass, and things felt as close to normal as they have in a good long while. We’ll stash some of that feeling away with the pickles and the jam, in case we need it to get us through the winter. Amidst the general hell-in-a-handbasketness of the world, I hope you get a chance to appreciate the beauties of your particular version of September, and to stock up on friends and music and joy.  I’ll look forward to a little more of that later this month, and see some of you there. Thanks everybody. *kd

UPCOMING SHOWS
SEP 25 - CLUB PASSIM - Cambridge, MA Tix
SEP 30 - THE EGREMONT BARN - South Egremont, Ma Tix

JUNE/JULY NEWSLETTER

JUNE // PATREON UNDER WAY // BLOOD TEST SHOW

In June, the mock orange by the barn blooms, sending plumes of its heavy fragrance drifting around the yard. I planted it because it reminds me of my Nana - my maternal grandmother Erna Johnson - who had one growing in her back yard in Brooklyn. Her parents, Alfred and Olga Johannson, were ethnic Swedes living in Finland, and immigrated to the US in 1900 to avoid Alfred being conscripted into the Russian army. They came over in steerage on an ocean liner, arrived with no money or connections, and settled in a Swedish neighborhood in Harlem. 

Alfred got a job on the Manhattan docks, working his way up to foreman, but in 1915 he died of a heart attack at age 42, leaving Olga behind with four young children. Although she never mastered English, somehow she raised those kids by taking in laundry and doing other odd jobs she could do from home. She ran a tight ship, by necessity if not by temperament. My grandmother Erna was the eldest child and a brilliant student, but even when she was offered a full scholarship to the University of Michigan, her mother told her that college wasn’t an option for her; she needed to stay home and work her brothers through school. 

She met my grandfather Royal Smith at work: she was a secretary in his office, and he courted her by leaving poems on her desk. They married in 1933 and eventually took over his family’s house in Flatbush. Royal was the son of a professional pianist and singer, and by all accounts a lovely and mild-mannered man. He had been recruited as a pitcher by the Yankees at one point, and was himself an accomplished musician and composer, but left both those dreams by the roadside for a steady office job. They raised their two daughters in Brooklyn and spent summers in a little house on a lake in northern New Jersey where Erna grew the flowers and Royal grew the vegetables. 

Royal also died young, and Erna had a twenty-year chapter in the big Victorian house without him, which is how I knew her. She had a deeply irreverent streak and a mischievous sense of humor, a sharp intellect and a real curiosity about people. She’d chat up anybody, anywhere. On her 76th birthday my folks took her out to a Swedish restaurant, where she announced that in honor of her “year of independence” she’d be drinking vodka (an unprecedented move). Somehow she figured out that one of the kitchen staff was from her parents’ town in Finland, and he ended up sitting at their table for the rest of the night, reminiscing about the homeland. At Christmas she and her brother Verner would wrap and give each other identical cartons of Parliament cigarettes. She volunteered at Brooklyn Hospital for many years, and established the gift shop there. A bolt of lightning once came into her kitchen where she was washing dishes, and zapped the sponge right out of her hand. 

Endlessly creative and up for anything, my grandmother was a kindred spirit to me throughout my childhood. She accepted all my imaginary scenarios with perfect seriousness, and would stay committed to any make-believe game for hours. At her house, we’d always eat dinner – lamb chops, canned potatoes, canned asparagus, and Yoo-Hoo – on a blanket on the kitchen floor as if it were a picnic, and we’d have our dessert first, because life is uncertain. Toward the end of her life she lived mostly in that kitchen, where she sat in her carved wooden rocking chair listening to the radio and smoking late into the night. She died just shy of her 80th birthday, when I was almost twelve, and it was the first big grief I was old enough to feel. 

While the mock orange is blooming, I think about Erna every day. The scent transports me to her house in summer, the sagging back porch with big black wasps living under the eaves, where we’d eat fast-melting popsicles and crack up over private jokes. I wonder what her path would have looked like if she’d had as many doors open to her as I have, but it’s hard to imagine a bigger or more joyful life than the one she made for herself with what was available. I wish could lie on the floor with her, hoist a Yoo-Hoo or a vodka, and have a long catchup on all our real and imaginary worlds.

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PATREON UNDER SAIL // We’re off to a strong start over on Patreon. For one thing, it’s helpful to have a bit of reliable income coming in during this in-between time, when the era of livestreams has waned but in-person life is still in the process of firing back up, and I’m grateful to people for showing up and pitching in. But practical concerns aside, it’s really been fun to do a little dissection of creative work and life as a songwriter, and share some by-products of the process. In my mind, I’m framing it as a one-year project (although it could always go longer if that seems like the move) - so if you’re interested, head on over and sign up to be a part of it for any amount starting at $3/month.

BLOOD TEST // My voice is all the way back, and I’m ready to reschedule the Blood Test throwback show as soon as the time seems right. My sense at the moment is that between the warmer weather and the gradually opening horizons, people’s energy is focused out of the house. But maybe just a little later in the summer, when we’ve worn ourselves out a little bit, we’ll all be ready to get back on the couch for a night. Stay tuned and I’ll let you know when the plan emerges.

READING RECS // Two recent music-related books I really loved were Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Little Devil in America, a sweeping, emotional meditation on the history of Black performance in America, and Rickie Lee Jones’ memoir Last Chance Texaco, the story of RLJ’s truly wild life told in her own sly, smart, free-range style. Both great additions to any summer reading stack.

It’s a strange time, isn’t it? There’s so much optimism and relief but at the same time many of us are feeling tentative, disoriented, and/or exhausted. Seems like a good moment to offer kindness and try to cut everyone in our lives (including ourselves) a little slack. Maybe even have dessert first. *kd

UPCOMING SHOWS
AUG 28 - Green River Festival - duo set with Jeffrey Foucault Tix

MAY NEWSLETTER

VOICE SITUATION // PATREON // GREEN RIVER

Well folks, it seems I managed to get all the way through April without sending a newsletter, or really piping up publicly in any way. It’s been a strange little run over here since about mid-March, when I suddenly developed an issue with my voice. One day I spent a two-hour drive belting out the Hamilton soundtrack with my daughter as per usual, the next day a significant part of my singing range had packed up and left the building with no forwarding address. Coincidence? We’ll never know, but since then I’ve been on a little odyssey of docs and scopes and voice therapy. The good news is there’s nothing drastically wrong in there aside from some muscle strain, and every day I’m reclaiming new notes from the abyss. In all honesty it’s kind of insane that I’ve made my living as a singer for half my life without knowing anything about how to take care of my voice or use it sustainably, so it’s great to be learning these things even if I had to be forced into it. It’s also pretty lucky that this happened in this moment when I have the time and space to recover, rather than halfway through a tour, or on the first day of a recording session!

I did have to put a few things off because of this situation, including the Blood Test throwback show, and I’ll announce a new date for that soon. In the meantime, I’ll be here working on rehabbing the pipes, which involves spending a couple hours every day making comical and unlovely sounds that freak out the dog and embarrass the kid attending remote seventh grade in the next room. So unfolds the glamorous rock-n-roll lifestyle.

PATREON // I’ve been stalking Patreon for a few years now. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve started to build a page and then gotten distracted with other projects or developed cold feet. But the stars have finally all aligned, and as of today I've launched the ship! My Patreon world will be focused on the creative process - or my own version of it - and all the strategies and practices that go into finding the path to new work. This is some of my favorite stuff to think and talk about, and I’m genuinely looking forward to having a place set aside to focus on it. I’ll be sharing video performances of covers, demos of song experiments and exercises, and little essays on my own process and tangents. Other things may come up! Diversions may occur! Writing is an unruly process, and all I can say for certain is I’ll pipe up on a regular basis with reports from the field.

Making a life as an artist is like one big stage dive; commit to the leap, and hope that the combined strength of many hands will catch you before you hit the ground. So many of you have showed up to keep me airborne over the years, especially through this Covid chapter, which in truth felt more like diving out of an airplane than off a stage. I’m so grateful to everyone who has lent emotional and/or financial support through this time, and I’m excited to have something new to offer that I hope will be of interest to some of you. You can join this excursion right here, for any monthly contribution from $3 upwards - all levels are the same experience, so essentially it’s pay-what-you-like. Check it out and join me if you’re into it. https://www.patreon.com/krisdelmhorst

GREEN RIVER // It felt pretty surreal to sign up for the Green River Festival this summer, but everyone feels cautiously optimistic that by August we just might be able to pull it off! So if all goes well, I’ll be playing a set of songs with Esteemed Spouse Jeffrey Foucault in Greenfield MA amidst a great lineup of friends and heroes. Get vaxxed and get your tickets!

That’s it for the moment. Take some deep breaths of May and I’ll see you out there, be it on a livestream, Patreon, or possibly even an actual stage… *kd

UPCOMING SHOWS
AUG 28 - Green River Festival - duo set with Jeffrey Foucault Tix

MARCH NEWSLETTER

LOVE & TAXES // BORROWED PLACE // JF & GREG // BLOOD TEST THROWBACK

Between the anniversary of COVID and the flush of spring warmth we’re having here in the Northeast, there’s a lot of feelings happening. If you’re of the Midwestern or New England persuasion, you may want to read this newsletter in small doses.

LOVE & TAXES
On March 12 2020, I had a solo all-request show booked in Cambridge at Club Passim. As it turned out, of course, that was the day that everything started shutting down, and after spending all day in angsty waffling, the club and I made the last-minute decision to cancel. I offered to play from home — something I had zero experience with, but I scrambled around and figured out how to stream live to Facebook on my elderly phone, and the show, despite many glitches, went on. 

What I remember is how rattled and freaked out we all were - me, the audience, everyone - and how much it helped to convene, even in that foreign and awkward way. There’s always a service component of being a performer, but that night it felt like the whole job description. The show had nothing to do with me or my artistic ego. It was an emotional hearth that we all needed to gather around, myself included, and by the end I felt a little more grounded, a little more calm. Thus began this surreal year. 

We’ve been doing our taxes this week, which has involved a lot less tallying of travel expenses than usual, a lot more sifting through PayPal and Venmo statements. I’ve found myself tearing up repeatedly — maybe not the first time taxes have made me weep, although it’s usually from different emotions. Of course I knew that you all have supported our two-songwriter household through the pandemic financially, which is already a straight-up miracle; but as I re-read all the notes attached to the payments I saw the full scope of the ways you’ve kept us afloat. Every message letting us know our music was helping to process or soothe, distract or connect, made it feel like we had something useful to offer. And having a purpose, however modest, has been the antidote to despair.

Despite my best intentions I haven’t managed to write back to everyone individually, so let me take this moment to say, from the absolute bottom of my heart, THANKYOU to all of you who have carried us along with your tips, purchases, streams, shares, tweets, posts, emails, Venmo notes, and actual letters. It’s been a real lifeline throughout this whole chapter and we know how lucky we are. 

BORROWED PLACE
This week we released another song from the LIGHT BREAKS THROUGH EP on Bandcamp. “Borrowed Place” was in fact written in a borrowed place, a tiny cabin tucked on the shore of a lake in New Hampshire. I had come for an annual songwriting retreat with friends - one of my favorite things in the world - but I arrived that year with a heavy heart. A girl in my town, a bright creative only child much like my own, had recently died from injuries she suffered in an accident. Although I only knew her in passing, the whole thing was very close to home in many senses and I couldn’t shake the cloud of sadness I was carrying around. 

That first day on the lake, I sat on the shore with a guitar and let this song arrive and wash over me. On the surface I was doing the work of writing it, but beneath that it felt like the song was already on its way and all I needed to do was encourage it. The first time I sang it all the way through, a song sparrow landed in a tree above me and started singing fluid little phrases in the spaces between the lines. The answering vocals on this studio version hearken back to this surprise musical guest. 

It’s hard to talk about this kind of moment without sounding overly mystical, but my experience of writing this song was that I needed help and asked for it, and help arrived. I saw that Ursula’s thirteen years were made of love. She spent them pouring light into the world around her. Her death felt unfair, seemed way too early; still, ultimately, I found some peace in the idea that any number of years can add up to a life fully and beautifully lived. 

Ursula’s mom, whose grace and strength has been amazing to witness, gave her blessing for me to share this story. “Borrowed Place” is not “about” Ursula in the literal sense, but I do see it as a reverberation of her spirit, and I offer it now in honor of her sweet, strong, vibrant life.

If you’ve already preordered the Light Breaks Through EP, you can stream/download “Borrowed Place” now; if not, head on over to Bandcamp to check it out. Proceeds from this song will go to the Ursula Marie Snow Fund at the Art Garden, our community art studio in Shelburne Falls, MA. 

FRIENDS & RELATIONS - On March 14, Esteemed Spouse Jeffrey Foucault will be online at 7pm (pre-Grammys!) via Signature Sounds interviewing the one and only Greg Brown, a songwriter whose work I can’t imagine my life without. Our usual system is for whichever parent is not playing the livestream to have a movie night with the kid, but for this one I’ll breaking that contract to watch these two consummate midwesterners kick around the topics. I can’t recommend enough that you do the same. 

BLOOD TEST THROWBACK SHOW - Here’s an early heads-up that I’ll be revisiting the entire 2014 album Blood Test on April 8 - just shy of that album’s fifth birthday. They grow up so fast!  On my Facebook and YouTube, like we do it now.

Yours in all the feelings, *kd

FEBRUARY NEWSLETTER

FEBRUARY, ETCETERA

SIGNATURE SOUNDS ANNIVERSARY SHOW MARCH 4 - At the dawn of the century, when I was just a pup, I made my record Five Stories with Billy Conway and a cast of thousands. When it was done, I used the precarious magic of a credit card to print up 2000 CDs, which seemed at the time like a staggering, unsellable number. To save on shipping, I drove to the plant to pick them up in my ‘88 Subaru (that car had a disconcerting smell due to the ten gallons of fresh cow’s milk that had tipped over in the back a few years prior, but that’s a whole other story). When I got back to my Somerville apartment, my four housemates and I loaded the boxes in and arranged them in a dangerous teetering stack in our stairwell. For some reason we assigned each box a name, and wrote it on the side in Sharpie. This stack was known as “The Warehouse” and was (along with the 24-hr Kinko’s in Harvard Square where my friends and I printed up our snail-mail tour postcards at 2AM after gigs) more or less the extent of my professional infrastructure. As I started working through that first batch of records my housemates would say things like “oh great you sold Francesca” and “we’re getting down to the end of Melvin.”

Then, through a series of serendipitous twists and helpful advocates, I was introduced to Jim Olsen, who ran the scrappy up-and-comer indie label Signature Sounds. This was during a time of reshuffling in the music world, with a groundswell of energy around rejecting the old-school exploitative artist/label structures. Signature was certainly no corporate overlord, but along with most of my tribe I had a healthy blanket skepticism about labels and I’m not sure I went into my first conversation with Jim intending, or even hoping, for anything to come of it. As it turns out though, you can’t talk to Jim for more than five minutes without realizing that he’s A.) one of the good guys, and B.) operating from a sincere, wide-ranging, incorruptible love for music and musicians. Sig was also one of the first indie labels to start structuring artist-friendly, profit-sharing deals as a matter of practice. I’ll always be grateful that Jim invited me, Five Stories, and my poor business sense into the Signature fold, launching a 15-year stretch of releasing music together which has been a cornerstone and a real gift in my life. I’ve struck out on my own for the last couple records, but Sig and I are family forever.

The label turns 25 this year, which is a small miracle in itself, given how many small labels perished during that span of time as the industry got turned on its head by filesharing and then streaming. It’s a true testament to their grit and vision and willingness to change that they’re still here, 175 or so records later. To celebrate the anniversary, they’re putting on a series of shows at the Parlor Room with Sig artists past and present. On March 4th, I’ll do an unimaginably exotic thing, i.e. load a guitar or two and some gear into my car, drive (and I can’t emphasize this enough) away from my house, set up my gear on a stage with a microphone on it, have a little interview/chat with Jim, and play some songs for you. I’ll still be playing in an empty room; but it won’t be my empty room, and that’s a crucial distinction. Tune in here, and join me in finding out if I still know how to play standing up.

NEW EP - When we recorded Long Day in the Milky Way, we tracked 15 songs, mixed them all, and then cut the final album down to an even dozen. It was an agonizing process, because I loved the all the songs, and I promised the three we left off that they’d make it out eventually. For a midwinter offering, we’ve bundled them into a tiny EP called LIGHT BREAKS THROUGH. It’ll make its way onto all the streaming platforms eventually but for now it’s exclusively on Bandcamp, a company that has consistently shown up for artists throughout the pandemic. You can preorder the digital EP on my Bandcamp page right now and immediately receive the title track. “Light Breaks Through” is about the moment when you first notice a dark time starting to brighten. It’s a big friendly golden retriever of a song, and if it gives you a momentary feeling of optimism or even a little dance around your kitchen, it will feel that it’s done its job.

Thanks and hang in there everyone, *kd

UPCOMING SHOWS
4 MARCH - Signature Sounds 25th Anniversary Show online via the Parlor Room, 8PM ET watch

THROWBACK SHOW #4: SHOTGUN SINGER (2008)

SHOTGUN SINGER THROWBACK SHOW 1/22

Hi everyone, and Happy New Year I guess? I’ve been laying pretty low since the last days of 2020, but I’m emerging to play some music on the internet this Friday. It’s been an especially harrowing few weeks, even by current standards, and lacking much else to contribute I figured I’d offer up a moment of diversion in case anyone could use one. 

You can tune in live Friday, 1/22, 8pm ET, or watch the archived show later on Facebook or YouTube. These are the facts, and I hope to see some of you there. If you want more nerdy narrative and photos from the making of this record, by all means read on.

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SHOTGUN SINGER came out in 2008, but the whole thing was such a journey that it’s hard to step back far enough to see the whole arc of it. I started writing the songs in 2004, but was quickly sidetracked by collaborating with dead poets, a tangent that eventually claimed my full attention and resulted in the 2006 album, Strange Conversation. Once that was done (but not released), I circled back and started working on Shotgun in earnest.

I set sail with a couple key concepts in mind. Although I’d had what now seems like luxurious amounts of time in the studio for my earlier records, I’d still become aware that recording on the clock, with a live band, encouraged me to stick to what I already knew how to do. Taking time to explore the unknown, to risk failure, or learn some new moves wasn’t ideal with a room full of people waiting and the meter running. With Shotgun Singer I would work on my own, to remove time and money from the equation and allow for maximum freedom and experimentation. I also wanted to track my guitar and voice separately so that my chops wouldn’t be the limiting factor on anything, and so I could sing the way I do with no one else in the room. 

With a lot of advice and some borrowed gear from my engineer friends, I built a barebones portable recording rig. I needed a space for undistracted and uninterrupted work, and luckily my dear friend/neighbor/tour-mate Erin McKeown stepped in and offered her house, fondly known by us as La Petite Maison, as a live-in home studio while she was on the road. On a sunny day in March with the frozen New England landscape just starting to thaw, I loaded my car to the gills with instruments and gear for the short drive to Erin’s, rearranged her furniture to set up my tiny studio, and entered an immersive time of creative exploration and hard-working play.

The strategy was to take each song as far as I could alone, and only when I hit a point where I wanted something to happen that was truly beyond my skill or equipment would I bring in help. This led to a lot of improvising and wheel-reinventing, a few great surprises, and some hilarious failures. I made rhythm loops out of anything at hand, water glasses, close-mic’d corduroy, weird vocal sounds. I played a lot of bass, and while only one or two of the tracks ended up on the record, I found that framing the bass parts taught me more than anything else about the essence of a song, revealing the bone structure like an x-ray. It was all incredibly inefficient, in the most fruitful way: the slow, dogged slog towards competence.

I was deep in the land of solitude and didn’t interact with any other humans most days, but I talked plenty to myself, my instruments, the computer, the household appliances; especially my arch-nemesis, the fridge, which loved to ruin takes with sudden loud noises. I named him Frigo and the session files are littered with instances of me cursing him out. I was reading Virginia Woolf’s writing diaries, and her account of the lonely journey of creative work, the deep swings from inspiration to frustration and back, gave me a sense of profound companionship. 

After three solo stretches totaling maybe four or five weeks, I was ready to bring other people into the process. The first was drummer Makaya McCraven, who these days is a star in the jazz world, but at the time was still a local secret. Justin Pizzoferrato engineered a session at his studio built into an old bank. Another day, I set up in my dining room to receive a small parade of visiting friends: both Peter Mulvey and David Goodrich played some guitar lines, and Barry Rothman came with his turntables and shortwave radio to play live samples in real time. At a later session at Spirit House in Northampton, Erin chipped in on piano and requinto, and later still a quick Boston session caught Kimon Kirk on bass. 

The surprise plot twist came that fall, when I found out I would have a baby in June! Suddenly I had a hard deadline to assemble a full year’s worth of tracks, recorded in ten different places, into a finished record, all with a slightly foggy pregnant-lady brain. I was going to need reinforcements, so I enlisted Sam Kassirer, who I knew from Josh Ritter’s band, to help me land the plane. 

Sam and I spent a very snowy January week at his Great North Sound Society, sifting through the tracks, pruning and arranging, adding various keys and vibraphone, recutting some strings and vocals. We made as many decisions as we could and then moved the party to Q Division in Somerville MA, where we mixed with ace engineer Kris Smith. Jeff Lipton mastered it at Peerless, and Paul Fucik did the design, which I still love.

Shotgun didn’t officially come out until April, but I started touring the second it was printed, mostly with my pals Winterpills as the band. We played shows across the USA, Europe, and the UK, February through May, the available space for my guitar (and my lungs) steadily decreasing as my belly grew larger. I got home just time to catch my breath before our daughter arrived in June, ushering in a new and entirely different chapter of life.

Looking back, I’m tremendously grateful for the journey of this album. It was the venue for learning and growth on many fronts, representing a huge step forward in terms of conscious authorship and artistic intention. All these songs have held their interest to me over the years. There’s enough space in them to accommodate motion, and enough mystery to refract new meaning over time. Ultimately, though, they’re about love in its many forms, and its power to transform and redeem us. If that’s not relevant to the current moment, I’m not sure what is.

I look forward to perceiving your presence over the internet this Friday and I hope everyone is safe and well.

Yours in the returning light, *kd

JAN 22- THROWBACK SHOW #4 - SHOTGUN SINGER
8:00pm ET/US on KD’s Facebook and Youtube
Tips:
VENMO: @Kris-Delmhorst
PAYPAL: https://www.paypal.me/krisdelmhorst
ONLINE TIP JAR: https://bit.ly/3dE48QQ

SOLO ALBUM RELEASE SHOW 17 SEPTEMBER

SOLO ALBUM RELEASE SHOW SEPTEMBER 17 // THANKYOU

Here at the hinge where summer meets fall, the light seems to change character completely and all at once. The transition from dusty, syrupy August into the sharp clarity of September feels like a reawakening to me every time, a head-clearing shift. The kitchen table is piled with cucumbers and peaches, the sunflowers outside the window busy with honeybees and goldfinches; everyone stocking up, making the most of the season. I’ve never been home all summer before, and despite all the small inconveniences and towering sorrows of the pandemic, I’ve loved the silver lining of being here to receive all the gifts that our little backyard ecosystem has to offer.

It’s been a couple weeks now since we released Long Day in the Milky Way, and if things were still proceeding according to the original plan, right about now I’d be deep into the logistical details for a fall’s worth of touring around with the band. It’s still hard to wrap my head around the fact that such a thing won’t be possible for the foreseeable future. Playing the new songs night after night, getting deeper inside them as a band, introducing them around to all my favorite stages and towns, is such a huge part of the arc of an album. I know we’ll get to play it live together someday, but until then this chapter is bound to feel incomplete.

That said, I still want to find some interesting ways to perform versions of the record within the limited options available, and I’ll attempt a few different takes on this over the course of the fall. For starters, I’m going to strip it all the way back and play the album in a way I definitely never envisioned: solo, livestreaming from home.

The whole ethos of this record is togetherness and group effort, a collective interweaving of voices and sounds, so the idea of performing it by myself is a slightly daunting prospect. But, as a listener I’m usually interested in hearing the bare-bones versions of songs I’ve only heard on record, and I’m going on faith that there will be something of value to be found by leaping off this particular cliff. Also, with no one else on stage waiting around for me to start the next song, I’ll be free to talk as much as seems relevant, and I’ll be happy to share some thoughts about the songs and recording process, take questions, etcetera.

This is a ticketed show on Thursday, September 17 at 8pm EDT, hosted by Veeps. We’ve set it up with a sliding scale of prices from $10-$40, so you can choose what makes sense for you to pay. There is, of course, a live chat so you can pipe up with comments or questions, and if you can’t make it to watch live, the show will stay up for ticketholders for a few days afterwards. You can buy your tickets anytime right here.

A little later in the fall we’ll get a minimal band together and offer another rendition of the record with a few more colors filled in, a little more flesh on the bones. But more on this once I’ve survived the solo outing.

THANKYOU

I’m grateful to all the music writers who have given the record close listens and nice reviews thus far. Here are a few snippets:

“A cinematic dream, one fashioned like a Kelly Reichardt film… best savored on a firefly-filled summer evening as darkness creeps in.” No Depression

"From start to finish Delmhorst takes the listener for an emotional ride that goes from whisper to roar as she weaves through melodic moments with poignant peaks and valleys.”
 American Songwriter

"As so often is the case with Delmhorst's songs, each one provides the listener with a tiny refuge, a place of comfort to curl inside and ride out the storms of the world, such is the soothing effect of her voice and vision. She's exactly the balm we need in this particular moment of both individual and collective grief." Folk Alley

"The songs on this record attest to the darkness that’s to be found, but Delmhorst writes with such prodigious insight and earnest seeking that her songs always allow for the maximum passage of light… Delmhorst is here, as ever, at the top of her game, peerless.”
 Performer Mag

Most of all, I’m thankful for the notes and posts from so many of you sharing your thoughts about the record. These songs aim to be useful, and if they make so much a an hour of this crazy year pass easier for anyone, I’ll consider the whole venture a success. Hang in there and I’ll hope to commune with some of you at the show in a couple weeks.

Yours in the new light, *kd

UPCOMING SHOWS

SEPT 17 - LONG DAY IN THE MILKY WAY Solo Online Release Show/Q&A - Tix

LONG DAY IN THE MILKY WAY OUT TODAY

It’s here! You can buy CDs, LPs, downloads, and T’s right now in the store, and stream anywhere. Enjoy the new music!

AUGUST: NEW SINGLE "HORSES IN THE SKY"

I’m happy to announce we’ve released another song into this crazy world! “Horses in the Sky” is the final single from LONG DAY IN THE MILKY WAY before the whole record comes out on August 14th.

“Horses in the Sky” (not to be confused with Rickie Lee Jones’ “The Horses,” which is also on the record - I know, I know) was the first song I wrote that gave me an inkling of where I was headed with this record, what musical and lyrical ideas it was going to center around. This is a song about holding on to hope. It’s about the darkness that lurks around every life, about not letting that darkness swallow us. You can find it in all the usual online places, and if you want to share it around or add it to your playlists, that definitely would not be a bad thing.

Making videos in quarantine has been an interesting challenge, but I actually loved working on this one long-distance style with the amazing editor Maya Pisciotto. With her guidance and a lot of conversations back and forth between me in New England and her in California, I shot the footage in and near my house (with invaluable assistance from my podmates, including some strong work on a few shots from a 12-year-old videographer who had to be bribed with pie) and sent it all to her in a heap. Maya took all this distinctly unpolished raw material and magically edited it into something quite beautiful, a meditative, non-literal dance through darkness and light. I love the very end of it so much. This song means a lot to me, and I hope it has something to offer some of you in these fraught days.

VIRTUAL & IN-PERSON SHOWS

Two very different performances are happening in the next couple weeks. First, a livestream on August 7 with the London-area venue The Green Note, a sweet Camden club I’ve played in person several times over the years. This one is in the round with two friends I haven’t seen for years, Devon Sproule and Carsie Blanton who I’m really looking forward to hearing and communing with (even in a grid of squares). This show is at 8pm UK time, which could make a nice daytime show for people Stateside too (3pm ET/noon PT).

I also have a live IN-PERSON show at Black Birch Vineyard in Hatfield, MA on August 18. There are very few invitations to play live that I would consider accepting right now, but I trust the folks at Signature Sounds to do a thoughtful, responsible job of putting on a show under current circumstances and I can vouch that they are taking every detail extremely seriously in setting these events up. More info is on the ticket page here. We’ll play some songs from LONG DAY IN THE MILKY WAY and some older more familiar songs too, assuming we remember how…

Thanks so much to everyone who participated in the Friends & Fans Advance Preorder on Bandcamp - packages all shipped out at the end of last week, and should be making their way to you soon if they haven’t already. If anyone has any issues with their order, please let us know at info@krisdelmhorst.com and someone will help you out. If you missed that wave, you can still preorder the album in digital or physical form on my Bandcamp page. I appreciate all the notes of encouragement and am so happy that the new songs are finally free to go meet new people.

More next week on release day! *kd

UPCOMING SHOWS:

AUGUST 7 - “Virtually Green Note” (CAMDEN, UK) in the round with Devon Sproule & Carsie Blanton - 8pm BST Links/Info
AUGUST 18 - KD LIVE (SOCIALLY-DISTANCED) SHOW at Black Birch Vineyard, HATFIELD, MA 6:30PM ET Tix/Info

NEW SINGLE "THE HORSES"

NEW RICKIE LEE JONES COVER “THE HORSES” // ALBUM PREORDER

Hey everyone, I’m very happy to announce the release of “THE HORSES,” the second single from my new record LONG DAY IN THE MILKY WAY. This one is a song I didn’t write, but one that’s nonetheless very close to my heart.

Rickie Lee Jones is one of my all-time favorite songwriters and performers, and this is one of my favorite of her songs to sing.  I’ve often started shows with it, as a sort of sage smudge to get the air right, and I also sang my daughter to sleep with it a thousand times when she was little. When I was sending demos to the band to learn for the new album, I added “The Horses” to the list on a whim. It felt like it aligned well with the themes of my current batch of songs, and I thought it would be fun to swing on, but I didn’t envision actually putting it on the album. By the time it came to finalizing the tracklist, however, I missed it every time I tried to cut it, so it stayed. It’s ultimately a song about taking care of each other, which is even more relevant now than it was when we recorded it last fall, and it makes me feel better every time I sing it.

Rickie Lee is a force and an inspiration. On stage she’s joyful, ruthless and incredibly brave, taking big risks even with songs she’s been playing for decades. Every time I see her play I stand there beaming with tears pouring down my face. As a writer she blends deep musical chops with an unflinching gaze, a sly sense of humor, and limitless compassion for her fellow human beings. I’m grateful for her body of work and her guiding light, and I’m thrilled to have her song hanging out with mine on this record. You can find it wherever you access music on the internet, so take a listen and I hope you enjoy it.  

ALBUM PREORDER
Thanks to everyone who took part in the Friends & Fans Advance Preorder! It’s helped immeasurably on this end and I really look forward to shipping your music to you later this month. Long Day in the Milky Way is now available for regular preorder on my Bandcamp page as well as Apple Music, Amazon, etcetera. Here’s the official tracklist:

1. Wind’s Gonna Find a Way

2. Golden Crown

3. Hanging Garden

4. Secret Girl

5. Horses in the Sky

6. Skyscraper

7. The Horses

8. Flower of Forgiveness

9. Nothing ‘Bout Nothing

10. Crow Flies

11. Bless Your Little Heart

12. Call Off the Dogs

Thanks for all the nice notes of support and excitement about the new record. I can’t wait to share more about it over the coming weeks. For now, enjoy the new track and let’s all keep looking out for each other.

Yours in borrowed light, *kd

UPCOMING SHOWS:
Nothing is official now but a few exciting things are upcoming so stay tuned!

FRIENDS & FANS PREORDER ENDS MONDAY NIGHT

photo: Joe Navas

Whew everyone, the world is really on a roll. I hope you’re hanging in there and remembering to take a few deep breaths every now and then.

Thanks for all your nice notes about the new song. If you haven’t heard “Wind’s Gonna Find a Way” yet, you can listen anywhere you stream or download music, or watch the video here. I appreciate all of you who’ve added it to your streaming playlists, which really helps the music find its way around - both directly, from human to human, and also via the mysteries of the almighty algorithm.

The full album Long Day in the Milky Way comes out next month, and right now you have a few more days to jump on the Friends & Fans Preorder on Bandcamp, which continues through Monday, July 6th. On the preorder page, you can get advance copies of the new album in digital, CD, or LP formats, signed or unsigned. There are a few extra offerings too, like a 3-LP set of all the records I’ve pressed to vinyl (including Long Day), handwritten lyrics to any KD song, and private online house concerts. You can also purchase any of these things as a gift to be sent to someone else, to brighten up their summer hunkering.

These advance sales are incredibly helpful in terms of funding the record, and I’m grateful to everyone who’s gotten on board with the preorder. Given the chaotic state of the world, I opted not to launch a full-blown crowdfund for this one, but I still have steep recording costs to chip away at, and thanks to all of you we’re slowly getting there. If you’re someone who likes to get your ears on the songs early, and/or you just want to help support the making of music in a challenging time, head to the preorder page and check it out.

Oh and tomorrow, Friday the 3rd, Bandcamp is graciously waiving their fees to help support artists, so if you’ve been meaning to preorder, that would be an especially useful day to do it.

Thanks so much for all the support and kindness folks, I appreciate it more than I can express. Remember to take a little time out to do summery things like naps, popsicles, and tanning the top half of your face.

Yours halfway through the year, *kd

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Donation links:
KD Venmo: @Kris-Delmhorst
KD Paypal
KD Online Tip Jar

NEW SINGLE TODAY / NEW ALBUM IN AUGUST

NEW SONG TODAY // NEW ALBUM 8/14 // FRIENDS & FANS PREORDER

Today I’m thrilled to announce the release of a new song, “Wind’s Gonna Find a Way.” It’s the first track on the record Long Day in the Milky Way, which will come out August 14th.

“Wind’s Gonna Find a Way” is about persistence, about playing the long game, making yourself inexorable. I wrote this song almost exactly a year ago, but I think it resonates with the present moment in any number of interesting ways. It speaks to the slow work of untangling the stubborn knots in a life, or a history; of devoting yourself to a path, whether it’s creative work or some other calling, or just the rocky journey of being alive. You can listen right now anywhere you harvest music, and you can also check out my homemade-in-quarantine video here:

Official video for "Wind's Gonna Find a Way" from the upcoming album LONG DAY IN THE MILKY WAY (August 14 2020) Lyrics: Long day in the Milky Way, hammering ...

Now people, the internet is a crowded place these days, and to push the signal of independent music through the noise is a challenge to say the least. If you want to help this song and its friends to get heard, there are three main ways to do it:

1. Add it to a playlist on the streaming service of your choice, and share that playlist with your many and various friends.
2. Order yourself an early-release copy of the record on the Friends & Fans Bandcamp Preorder (more on this below)
3. If you don’t already, you can follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, and subscribe to the KD email newsletter. You’ll be in the loop for updates around the new music, but also, in our algorithm-driven world, it really, really, really helps us musicians in several behind-the-scenes ways if you add yourself to our numbers on these platforms.

FRIENDS & FANS PREORDER

As I’ve mentioned before, the unique shitshow of 2020 led me to scrap my plans for the full bells-and-whistles Kickstarter-type push for this record. But I still want to offer you a chance to get the music before the release date, and I’m happy to do that via Bandcamp, a company that’s been artist-friendly and non-icky from the beginning, and has really stepped up to lead by example since the pandemic hit: offering fee-free days to help bolster income for artists while they're unable to tour, as well as committing 100% of their share of sales on Juneteenth (this coming Friday) to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, to support the push for racial justice.

We’ve set up a Friends & Fans Preorder where you can order Long Day in the Milky Way in digital or signed physical (CD/LP) form, as well as a few extras like handwritten lyrics and private live-streamed house concerts. You’ll get your ears on the music a few weeks before the 8/14 release date, and you’ll help support independent music during a very challenging time. This special preorder will only run from today (6/15) through Tuesday, July 7, so check it out and please help spread the word.

This music has been waiting patiently in my home and my heart since we recorded it last November, and I’m so happy to finally be able to share it with you all.



Yours in the spirit of the new, *kd

PS: Also, a reminder that tonight is the last (for now, anyway) of the Throwback shows - this one spotlighting the Strange Conversation album from 2006, so I’ll “see” some of you there.

UPCOMING SHOWS:
JUNE 16 - THROWBACK #3: KD plays STRANGE CONVERSATION, 8:00pm ET
Streamed live on KD’s Facebook page and KD’s YouTube (shows will remain archived if you miss them live)

Donations accepted here:
KD Venmo: @Kris-Delmhorst
KD Paypal
KD Online Tip Jar

THROWBACK SHOW #3 : STRANGE CONVERSATION

THROWBACK SHOW #3: STRANGE CONVERSATION 6/16

This Tuesday I’m revisiting my 2006 album Strange Conversation, a collaboration of sorts with a number of well-known poets. The show is at 8pm ET and will remain up for a while in case that doesn’t line up with your time zone. You can tune in on Facebook or Youtube. Here’s a little more about this record if you’re interested to read on - or just join me for the show on Tuesday night.

In 2005, I got stuck while working on a song and wandered out of my room looking for distraction. I picked up the Norton Anthology of Poetry I’d had since seventh grade – it was out on the coffee table, for some reason – and flipped idly through it until I landed on a poem of Robert Browning’s called “A Toccata of Galuppi’s.” It wasn’t a poem I’d read before or one I would have been particularly drawn to, but the moment I scanned the verses a strange thing happened which I can only describe as the poem singing itself in my head. It seemed to have a melody which I could hear as I read, and all I had to do was pick up a guitar and play along. Apparently Browning composed and played music in addition to writing poetry, so maybe this was no accident. At one point in the poem, he even calls out the chord changes, so he was definitely coming from a like-minded place. 


In the poem, the nineteenth-century speaker describes how listening to a piece of music by Baldassare Galuppi brings back to life the eighteenth-century Venetian composer’s world: warm spring ocean, masked midnight balls, ladies whirling around the dance floor and flirting by the clavichord. It’s vivid and lively, but when Browning gets to the end, the conclusion he draws is kind of a downer. He allows that the music-makers achieve a certain degree of immortality through their work, but as for the dancing ladies, he essentially says “Those people are dead, and we’re all gonna die too, The End.” Here’s the thing, though: those Venetian ladies danced in their own time, then took a turn around the room with Robert Browning a full century later, and were now whirling and flirting in my twenty-first century living room in Massachusetts. If that’s not immortality, I don’t know what is. I reworked the ending of the song to reflect how I saw things, and by the end of the process I had changed Browning’s language, as well as his central idea, and ended up with a song that felt like the beginning of something. From that point on, poem-based songs seemed to arrive in a steady stream, from everywhere.

My odd, possible-cult-member upstairs neighbor left a box of books out on the curb; I rescued it from a rainstorm, and in it I found George Eliot’s poem “O May I Join the Choir Invisible,” another meditation on art’s powers of communication across time. I happened upon Lord Byron’s “We’ll Go No More A-Roving,” which was already a perfect country ballad, and then began to pore over old favorites like Rumi, e.e. cummings, Walt Whitman, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, to see if they had any songs waiting. My husband, Jeffrey Foucault, reminded me that his old roommate Mark Olson (not the Jayhawks one) had put James Weldon Johnson’s “Sence You Went Away” to music years earlier. I dug that out, tinkered with it, re-rigged a verse into a bridge, and added it to the pile.

I’d had a book club at my old group house in Somerville, in which we’d read Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil. I may have been the only person in the group who liked it, but I liked it enough for everyone, and it stayed with me. Once I realized I was making a record about the powers and limitations of art, I started re-reading passages, and from that came the songs “Strange Conversation” and “The Drop & the Dream:” one song despairing over the imperfect nature of creative work, the other coming to terms with it. The pendulum motion between those two states of mind pretty well sums up the experience of being an artist.

Aiming for classic instrumentation and players with a certain esprit de coeur, I enlisted Lorne Entress, a great drummer I’d first met through his work with my friend Erin McKeown, to help me captain the ship; Paul Schulhof, upright bass player extraordinaire and bright spirit; and Kevin Barry, one of my all-time favorite guitar players. We convened at Chris Rival’s Middleville Studio in North Reading, MA., an old barn attached to a farmhouse, with the control room on the ground floor, and the tracking spaces in the basement. At the time, Chris was rebuilding the stairs that connected these rooms, so each trip from control room to live room required walking all the way around the barn and down the hill behind it, a perfect little moment of fresh air and crunching November leaves to clear the head between takes. It was the first time I recorded in an isolation booth, and it took a little getting used to, but I had great sightlines with everyone, and settled in quickly thanks to Rival’s laid back, invisible attention to every detail.


A recording session is a little like an existential summer camp in the way that it becomes, briefly, its own universe. We laughed like fools and concentrated like surgeons, making an island out of time where only the work at hand existed. When we had tracked the songs we brought in a horn section – dream realized! – and cut a few keyboard overdubs. Once again, I railroaded the whole band into singing gang vocals on a few songs, which was pretty entertaining. Kevin brought out his Irish priest vocal persona – Father Patrick O’Shaughnessey? Father Dermot O’Callahan? – I forget his name, but the dude could really belt out the tenor part.

This record was a true joy to work on, all the way through the process. I didn’t start out chasing an idea in writing these songs, I was just following the breadcrumbs of passion and curiosity, and this made the whole process restorative and generous, the purest recreation. It’s a record about art, and the ways it lets us extend beyond our time, converse and commune with people we’ll never meet, places we’ll never see. I’m really fond of it, and grateful that it happened along. And I'm looking forward to playing through it with you on Tuesday. *kd

UPCOMING SHOWS:
JUNE 16 - KD plays STRANGE CONVERSATION, 8:00pm ET
Streamed live on KD’s Facebook page and KD’s YouTube (shows will remain archived if you miss them live)

Donations accepted here:
KD Venmo: @Kris-Delmhorst
KD Paypal
KD Online Tip Jar

SONGS FOR A HURRICANE THROWBACK SHOW 6/9

THROWBACK TUESDAY SHOW #2 - SONGS FOR A HURRICANE

Songs for a Hurricane was the classic second child: I have a stack of photos two inches high from the Five Stories recording session, and literally not one from Hurricane. Maybe somebody took some? But if they did I don’t have them. This shot of me on the floor of my Cambridge kitchen is from the approximate era, and that’s the closest I could get. In a way, I love its being undocumented. The sessions were a retreat from the outside world, and it's somehow apt to have them remain invisible.

Even before we’d finished making Five Stories, Billy Conway and I were already saying a lot of sentences that began “Next time we’ll…”, and it was never in doubt we’d take a swing at another record. We worked at Hi-n-Dry again, which had gotten very slightly more official in its studio setup since the last time around. Again Billy played drums, again Andrew Mazzone played bass. On guitar we had a rotating crew of gunslingers: Jabe Beyer, Kevin Barry, Mark Erelli, Steve Mayone. On keyboards, I imported my beloved friend Julie Wolf from the west coast to join the party. For Five Stories, we’d used every person and instrument we could think of, but for Hurricane we decided to narrow down the palette. The four of us (me, Billy, Andrew, Julie) tracked most everything live together, then matched guitar players to the tracks afterwards, tinkering around with a few other overdubs ourselves. Paul Q. Kolderie engineered this one at the loft, and then mixed it at his own Camp Street Studio. Dave Locke mastered it at JP Masters. 

Each record has its own aura, and this one’s, appropriately enough, was a little stormy and a little fraught - more outside the studio than in, as everyone seemed to be dealing with various intense personal situations at the same time. No one talked about it too much, but I think time spent recording these songs about heartbreak (I remember tying myself in knots in interviews at the time insisting it wasn’t a breakup record, but I don’t think I fooled anyone) served as a vehicle for everyone involved to process what they were going through. There are a lot of feelings in these songs, and there were a lot of feelings in the room while they were being recorded. That said, we laughed ourselves sore every day, and there were plenty of moments of light; brighter, maybe, in contrast with the overcast skies.

I remember Andrew playing 8-string bass on “You’re No Train” and how it felt like receiving a stern talking-to directly from God. I remember Kevin ripping through take after take of the outro guitar solo on the song “Hurricane,” each one more preposterously great than the last, until all the rest of could do was laugh. I remember Billy instructing Mark to play guitar on “Juice + June” channeling the persona of an old fat dude sitting on his porch in an undershirt with a beer…Billy standing over him as he played, yelling “Older! Fatter!!” I remember the first take of ”You’re No Train” with Julie on piano, and how her playing immediately made every molecule in the room slow down and get quiet. We’ve played that song live together at countless shows since and it does the same thing every time. I remember a million glances over at Billy when something good happened during a take, and always catching his eye sparkling, knowingly, back.

Making a second record in a row with Billy in the same space, with a lot of the same people, freed us up to work on some new levels. It was definitely the first time I had my feet under me enough to consider an album as a curated entity, with an intentional arc and cohesive themes, rather than just the last dozen songs I happened to have written. We thought a lot about the story the record told, and designed the sequence to loosely describe the shape of a hurricane; the gathering winds, the sudden calm of the eye, the rain and fallout, the gradual receding. 

Two images from these sessions that remain especially vivid are both from the recording of the last track, “Mingalay” - an old sailing song from Scotland that I’d learned from a friend in my early days of playing guitar, and always loved. I wrote an extra verse to tie it into the record, and used it as the last track. The first image is of Billy hanging as far as he could out the fifth-story window of the studio on a stormy night, reaching out a mic on a long cable, harvesting the sound of the howling wind (you can hear it over parts of the long outro). The sound of the gusts amplified through the studio speakers, and Billy seemed to pitch and toss like a half-crazed sea captain leaning over the plunging rail. It summed up something about Bill; a willingness to reach as far outside the box as necessary (even, in this case, outside the actual building) to serve the song. It was a wild night and a wild moment, dangerous, hilarious, and transcendent all at once. The picture is preserved in my mind forever in a way no camera could ever capture it.

The second image comes from the very last sounds we recorded for the album, also for “Mingalay.” We tracked several layers of backing vocals as the “Weary Sailor Chorus” - Billy, Julie, and saxophonist Dana Colley (who must have been around helping out that day), and me, standing around one mic. For each take we’d change places to make our different voices disperse better across the stereo field, and then crack each other up by adopting little personality quirks for each new sailor we were embodying. We were goofing around, but it was also a holy moment. 

Singing with other people is one of the most direct means of connection we have, with each other and with the spiritual undercurrent of existence, whatever name you choose to give it. To sing together in real time is a deeply honest and humble thing, faces open, souls unveiled. Standing in a little circle in the darkened brick room of the studio, singing with and to each other, connected by the bonds of deep trust that develop over an arduous journey, I felt all the doors fly open, all the layers of existence flow into each other and blend. Sound waves and wind gusts. New England rockers and weary Scottish sailors. Heartbreak, loss, struggle, devotion, homecoming. That’s why we do this. It’s what we’re chasing every time we write a song or get on a stage or hit Record. Finding it together is one of the most precious things I know.

Thankyou beyond all description to Billy for all the work and wisdom and care that shepherded this music, and this musician, into becoming. Thankyou Andrew, beloved and dearly-missed friend, Thankyou Julie, bringer of laughter and light. Thankyou Jabe, Kevin, Mark, Steve for lending your unique versions of magic to these songs. Thankyou Paul and Dana and Dave, and the numerous friends who unwittingly stopped by to say hi and ended up roped into engineering for an hour, or a day. 

I’ll be playing through all these songs in a livestream Tuesday night 6/9 at 8pm ET. You can check out the show here on my Facebook, or on my YouTube channel - if all goes well - here. It’s a lot right now, folks: everyone’s dealing with the upheaval of the pandemic, and trying to keep themselves and their jobs and their families on the rails. I know many of us are also caught up in the push for racial justice in a moment that seems to have the potential for real impact. It’s all so important, and emotional, and tiring too. If this offers some of you a moment of respite from any of that, a chance to let your spirit float for a moment before you re-enter the various frays, I’ll consider it worthwhile. 

Thanks everybody and see you Tuesday *kd


UPCOMING SHOWS:
JUNE 9 - KD plays SONGS FOR A HURRICANE, 8:00pm ET
JUNE 16 - KD plays STRANGE CONVERSATION, 8:00pm ET
Streamed live on KD’s Facebook page and KD’s YouTube (shows will remain archived if you miss them live)

Donations accepted here:
KD Venmo: @Kris-Delmhorst
KD Paypal
KD Online Tip Jar

JUNE NEWSLETTER

THROWBACK #1 TONIGHT // FIVE STORIES

In a previous version of life, this would have been be the newsletter announcing the Kickstarter to crowdfund the money for my new record Long Day in the Milky Way. We recorded last year on borrowed cash, and made something I’m thrilled with and proud of; now it’s time to settle the debts and rustle up the money to release the album this summer. It’s the way records are made now, and if not particularly elegant, it usually works well enough.

But in all honesty as the time approached, given the circumstances - three months into a global pandemic, now a week into what I hope will be a genuine reckoning with the systems of violence and injustice that run through American life - I felt increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of rallying attention around an all-or-nothing monetary goal. I trust that the support is there, but I couldn't bring myself to call it in. I stewed a while and decided that just now offering feels better than asking. If I can offer something useful, I believe that one way or another, I’ll get this new record funded.

So this month I’m offering these solo shows live on the KD Facebook page spotlighting three of my early albums, filled with old songs people often ask me to play. Donations will go straight towards getting the new record paid off and into the world. Tonight, June 3rd, I’ll play Five Stories in its entirety, hopefully remembering most of the lyrics, and talk a bit about the songs. Next up will be Songs for a Hurricane on June 9, and Strange Conversation on June 16th. After that everything will be looking forward to the August release of Long Day in the Milky Way, an album that both ties together and builds on everything I've made all these years. Later this month I’ll start to talk more about the record, and we'll open up a pre-order site where you can pick up your pre-release signed albums and assorted extras. But for now, a bit of backstory on tonight’s featured record:

FIVE STORIES was recorded over a series of sessions in 2000 & 2001 at Hi-n-Dry in Cambridge, MA, shepherded by Billy Conway. The producer of my first album had brought Billy in to play drums, and while I was about as green as could be, I had enough of a clue to get that Billy was tuned into the frequencies that I wanted to understand. When I was ready to make my next record I called him up and asked him to both play drums and produce it. Bill was characteristically skittish about embracing the title of producer, but he said his version of yes, and proposed working at Hi-n-Dry. 

Hi-n-Dry was the loft apartment of the Morphine frontman Mark Sandman, and the clubhouse & rehearsal studio for Morphine and Mark’s other bands. Sandman had died the year before, and Billy and sax player Dana Colley were in a time of reeling and trying to regroup from the sudden loss of both their friend and their band, and part of that was the question of what to do with the loft. This record was one of the first forays into putting the space to use recording albums from outside the extended Morphine family, although over the next six or seven years there would grow to be a long list.

I had met Sandman once or twice, but I had never seen the loft, and I was entranced the moment I walked into that huge brick room. An expansive space on the fifth floor with huge windows on three sides, assorted band detritus posted and stored and strewn everywhere, every instrument you could think of and plenty others you couldn’t identify, and a vibe that made every surface and object glow with mystery and potential. Over the next year or so we spent numberless hours in that space as we chipped away at refining and recording my new batch of songs. 

Billy brought in Andrew Mazzone on bass, and I brought Sean Staples on mandolin and assorted things, and I think we tracked most of the record live with three or four of that core group. Billy’s buddy Steve Folsom, who was winding down a long run doing live sound for Melissa Etheridge, signed on to engineer under the notably uncontrolled conditions. The loft at that time had zero isolation of any kind; the players stood in a small circle, sometimes using monitor speakers rather than headphones, and the engineer sat at the small board right in the room. The sonic bleed was inevitable and absolute. I remember Steve tearing his hair out any number of times trying to get reasonably clean sounds, but that bleed is one of the most characteristic elements in the sound of Hi-n-Dry, and I love to hear it even when it's causing trouble. 

For overdubs we brought in everyone we could think of and got them to play anything they could find. The band was a blended crew of our two circles of friends. Billy introduced me to various of his associates: Kevin Barry and David Champagne on guitars, Evan Harriman on keys, Dana Colley on baritone sax, Tom Halter on flugelhorn. And I introduced Billy to a bunch of my crew as well: Sean Staples and Jabe Beyer on whatever was handy, Lori McKenna and Jennifer Kimball and Catie Curtis on vocals, Eric Royer on banjo, Tim Kelly and Nolan McKelvey and Dave Rizzuti and Dave Hill on everything from dobro to accordion. Everyone sang, whether they wanted to or not. Paul Q. Kolderie humored us by schlepping up a little extra gear and mixing the record right there in the same room. By the end of it, both Billy and I had acquired many lifelong friends and collaborators, and I had absorbed a priceless freshman survey course in how to go about capturing the elusive magic of people playing music into a bottle. 

The internet was not in the room with us, a state of affairs I often miss these days in the studio, when the fruitful moments of tedium and waiting are easily squandered with fruitless scrolling. What we lacked in connectivity we made up in time: from here, it seems like an impossible amount of time, to try different approaches, and listen and ponder and listen again, and consume vast quantities of takeout Pad Thai Country Style at the old scuffed kitchen table in the corner, spinning records on the turntable, telling stories, laughing, listening. 

For about the last decade Billy’s been my sister-husband, playing drums with Jeffrey on the road about a third of each year, and he just finally made a record of his own songs, which is as deep and as original as he is, and as good company. I've made a bunch more albums, each its own journey, and I've loved the process of every single one. But none could ever hope to match the making of Five Stories for the sheer revelation of it, the exhilarating climb up the steepest part of the learning curve, the doors opening and lightbulbs going on in my head every day. I keep those sessions in my head like an old hand-drawn map, folded and refolded countless times, and whenever I head into the studio I first smooth it out carefully and study the lay of the land again, try to call up everything I've learned from working alongside people who understood the important stuff: the value of limitations, the power of the moment; what to sweat and what to let go, when to chase and when to ride, how to keep the soul of a song in sight and let everything else take care of itself. 

I'm looking forward to playing through these old songs tonight, talking a little about where they came from, and holding them up to the light of 2020 and seeing if they have anything new to say. If you think this show will help you feel more human, or less alone in these exhausting and isolating times, please tune in. I’m not a protest singer but I hope what I can offer will leave you refreshed and ready to keep doing the important work of our time, participating in the struggle for justice and dignity for all people. Also, getting ready to vote like our lives depend on it, because they truly do.

Yours *kd

UPCOMING SHOWS:
JUNE 3 - KD plays FIVE STORIES, 8:00pm ET
JUNE 9 - KD plays SONGS FOR A HURRICANE, 8:00pm ET
JUNE 16 - KD plays STRANGE CONVERSATION, 8:00pm ET
All shows at http://facebook.com/krisdelmhorst (shows will remain archived if you miss it live)

Donations accepted here:
Venmo: @Kris-Delmhorst
Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/krisdelmhorst

Drawing: Andy Friedman Design: Jeffrey Foucault



MAY NEWSLETTER

LIVESTREAM W JF MAY 23

After my last livestreamed show, my daughter said she enjoyed it more than a regular live show because, in her words, “You seemed more like my mom. I think it was because you were less confident and professional.”

There’s a lot to unpack about this statement, but if nothing else I think we can agree that most of us are currently operating on a level somewhat below our normal baseline. It’s not all bad; there’s a lot to be learned from exploring the outer edges of the comfort zone, and it can also be enlightening and even charming to see people improvising from there, if you’re into that kind of thing.

In this spirit, I’ll be livestreaming from the kitchen with my bunkermate Jeffrey Foucault on Saturday, May 23, hosted by our friends at Freight & Salvage in Berkeley, CA. We’ll play a bunch of our own songs, dish up a few covers, and possibly sustain interruptions from the dog, cat, and/or 6th grader. This will go live at 5pm PT/8pm ET, so whether you join us from happy hour on the west coast, primetime on the east, or night-owl territory in Europe, we hope you’ll tune in. I believe the stream will stay up for a while afterwards in case any of you with time zone issues want to check it out after the fact.

I’ll leave it at that for this newsletter, so we can all take a deep breath before I start following you around the internet talking about the new record.

Yours in a distinct lack of professionalism, *kd

UPCOMING SHOWS:

MAY 23 - KD/Jeffrey Foucault pay-what-you-like duo livestream show via Freight & Salvage, BERKELEY, CA  - 5:00pm PT/8:00pm ET tune in

tix/info for all shows http://krisdelmhorst.com/tour

Photo: Joe Navas

APRIL NEWSLETTER, CORONA EDITION

ONLINE SHOWS // CARE & FEEDING OF MUSICIANS

Well friends, it’s a pretty weird time, and I confess it’s been hard to get myself to sit down and write this, what with various streaming technologies to speed-learn, significant levels of stress baking, the ever-present background noise of ambient confusion and dread, plus an undersocialized 11-year-old in the mix. Still and all there are things that need mentioning, so I’m here to mention them as best I can. 

First let me say that over the last month I’ve noticed a strong uptick in merch sales, record downloads, and contributions to the online tip jar, and I want to express my gratitude to all of you out there who are responsible. I’m not managing to reply to everything - despite my best intentions - but please know that I am seeing it all, reading each kind note, and it’s making a big difference here both in terms of finances and of morale. Thankyou, thoughtful people, you make the wheels keep turning. Now to our orders of business.

ONLINE SHOWS & APPEARANCES
I’m playing a solo livestreamed show TONIGHT, Tuesday the 14th for the Parlor Room Home Sessions at 8pm EST. I only got about halfway through my bowl of requests when I played my 3/12 Club Passim show online, so I’ll pull it back out for this show and see if we can get to a few more. This show should be available for at least a few days after it happens, for those of you in inconvenient timezones. There will be more online events, including  a KD/JF duo show upcoming in the next few weeks, so stay tuned here and on the socials to be in the know for those developments. 

I’ve also recently contributed homespun performance videos to two benefit playlists: Club Passim’s Keep Your Distance Fest to benefit their PEAR Artist Relief Fund, and Alastair Moock’s Quarantunes Playlist to benefit the MA United Way Family Support Fund. Many great artists on both so check those out and donate if you’re able.

CARE & FEEDING OF MUSICIANS
I’ve received quite a few friendly notes from people asking how best to help independent musicians get through this time, so I thought I’d share a few thoughts on that. As a member of a 100% songwriter-supported household, I can definitely attest that this is a challenging moment. At the same time, we’re aware of all the ways we musicians are really lucky; among other things, we can go online and do some version of our work in exchange for voluntary donations, which most hourly, part-time, or gig workers can’t. So, we’re doing what we can to keep our own little boat afloat, while also trying to extend as much help as possible to our musical and local communities. I’ll offer some ideas here of how you can reach out to the musicians you love if you’re looking to. My relevant links are included, but I mean these as general ideas to be used on behalf of any artist whose work matters to you. 

• Plain old TIPPING: many artists have an online tip jar (KD’s is here) or have been sharing their PayPal and Venmo links for tipping purposes (here’s KD Paypal). If you listen to/stream/love an artist and just want to send them a little support during this time, that’s a very straightforward way to do it. 

• “Attend” an ONLINE SHOW (for example,  KD plays the Parlor Room Home Sessions tonight 4/14 8pm EST!)

• Buy RECORDS AND/OR MERCH, preferably via the artist’s own website. Here’s the KD webstore.

• Subscribe to EMAIL LISTS (KD signup is here) and making sure the emails don’t end up in your spam/promotions folder. And of course, like-and-follow your favorite artists on SOCIAL MEDIA (here’s KD Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter). 

• Consider supporting an artist on their Patreon or CROWDFUNDING site. I’ll be launching a Kickstarter for the new record sometime in the next few months, and you can expect me to hassle you lavishly at that point.

• If you STREAM music, you can help your favorite artists out by adding their songs to your playlists and sharing those lists widely. Here’s KD on Spotify, as well as the complete KD catalog in one Spotify playlist, if you ever want to listen to my songs for up to 7 hours at a stretch (let’s hope things never get that weird).

• There’s an ever-growing list of ARTIST/FREELANCER RELIEF FUNDS you can pitch into to help people who work in music on a more general basis…for starters I’ll mention the national MusiCares, and Club Passim’s PEAR Artist Relief Fund, but here’s probably a local one set up in your town or city too. 
  

FRIENDS & EXTENDED-FAMILY
Many people in my world have put out great work recently to help you pass your time, and I’ll point you towards a few here: 

My dearest friend Lisa Olstein is known as an acclaimed poet, but she recently branched out and wrote a work of lyrical non-fiction called Pain Studies, exploring the nature of chronic pain: "Instead of settling for the idea that her pain is indescribable, she lays down shimmering prose that subtly unhinges the reader, conveying what it’s like to see the world from a migraine’s point-of-view. Pain Studies is, as a result—and this is just for starters—a fascinating look at what can happen when you attempt to pour pain into language."  There’s a non-Amazon way to get your hands on one right here.

Dietrich Strause plays keyboards, guitars, and horns on my upcoming record, but in the meantime he has a new record of mostly-solo recordings of his beautifully crafted songs out called Last Man Standing on the Sun - a lovely quarantine companion.

It’s been actual decades now that I’ve been collaborating with Ry Cavanaugh and he’s truly one of my favorite songwriters. Ry has a new record out of him performing late dad’s songs (accompanied by Duke Levine and Jennifer Kimball) which is really special.  Find yourself Time for This to stream or buy or both. 

A last thought: I’ve been listening to more music than usual lately (currently hooked on the new Waxahatchee record Saint Cloud among other things), and I’ve been reminded for the millionth time that music is magic. It’s one of the best ways there is to connect to our own feelings, and to each other, even at a distance. It rearranges the molecules in the room, in your mind and in your heart. It doesn’t take problems away, but it can refresh our spirits and leave us better able to face them. As an artist it’s easy to feel like my own work is irrelevant during a time of crisis, but as a music lover I know how much of a difference other people’s work makes to me. So here’s a pledge to keep making it and offering it up as best as I can for whoever needs it. We’re all compatriots in a strange new world - let’s each of us share what we can to help carry us through.

See you online somewhere, and in the world when we have the run of it again. Thanks everybody. *kd

UPCOMING SHOWS:
APRIL 14 - KD solo livestream show via The Parlor Room, NORTHAMPTON, MA  - 8:00pm EST Tix

tix/info for all shows http://krisdelmhorst.com/tour

Photo: Micah Albert

LEAP DAY // MARCH NEWSLETTER

LEAP DAY // KD SOLO IN NEW ENGLAND

LEAP DAY: Four years ago, I wrote a little songlet for a Sub Rosa show that fell on the most elusive of dates. Its rare season having come back around, and Leap-themed repertoire being in short supply, I thought I’d offer it up for general use. Please feel free to include this song in all your Leap Day festivities from here on out! We will be celebrating with the final show of our West Coast tour: 2/29 at Ballard Homestead in Seattle WA.

I made this video at a family gathering in Vermont a couple weeks back with the help of my daughter and her cousin, both real handy with a pair of scissors.

KD SOLO IN NEW ENGLAND: There are still a very very few tickets remaining for the solo show 3/12 at Club Passim in Cambridge, MA. Plenty still available for the other solo outing on 4/10 at the Word Barn in Exeter, NH. It’s pretty rare that I talk myself into playing truly solo, so if that’s your bag, these shows are for you.

SIDE PROJECTS & EXTENDED-FAMILY NEWS:
Rose Cousins is a top-shelf Canadian and one of my favorite people to sing with. Her own new one BRAVADO is just out and a thing of much beauty. Listen, absorb, repeat.

Dave Godowsky writes sneaky songs that lure you in with catchy melodies and clever lyrics, but turn out to be deeply emotive and existential. His new album CUTS is out today and ready for deployment in your life.

That’s it folks. Leap like you mean it. *kd

UPCOMING SHOWS:

FEBRUARY 29 - Ballard Homestead, SEATTLE, WA Tix
MARCH 12 - KD solo @ Club Passim, CAMBRIDGE, MA Tix
APRIL 10 - KD solo @ Word Barn, EXETER, NH Tix

tix/info for all shows http://krisdelmhorst.com/tour

FEBRUARY NEWSLETTER

WEST COAST TOUR // SOLO NEW ENGLAND SHOWS

Not gonna lie folks, it’s a challenge to stay focused amidst the daily tsunami of current events, but shows must be played and bells must be rung, so here I am to ring them at you. I thought it would be refreshing for us all to stick to undisputed facts, which I will lay out for you here.

FACT #1: THERE IS A FEBRUARY WEST COAST DUO TOUR. We’ll start by loitering around northern California for a few days to play 2/20 at The Crepe Place in Santa Cruz, 2/21 at Hopmonk Tavern in Novato, 2/22 at Amado’s in San Francisco, and 2/23 at Feist Wines in Sutter Creek. Then we’ll head up to pay a visit to the Pacific Northwest, specifically 2/26 at Bunk Bar in Portland OR, 2/27 at the Sylvia Arts Center in Bellingham WA, 2/28 at the Victoria Listening Room in Victoria BC, and 2/29 at Ballard Homestead in Seattle WA. My friend and frequent tourmate Austin Nevins will be on hand to play guitars with me and help find adventures. Please get your tickets early, so we don’t have to stress about if anyone is coming, and you don’t have to stress about whether or not the show will be sold out. There is enough general stress without adding these easily avoidable situations into our lives. SPECIAL NOTE FOR PORTLANDIANS: we put some extra effort into making a PDX show happen, and the only way we could get it to work was to play on a Wednesday, so we are going to need you guys to get your rally hats on and have an afternoon espresso or a post-work disco nap, whatever it takes to enable you to come out mid-week. We’re looking forward to you rising to this challenge and we trust you implicitly.

FACT #2: THERE ARE A COUPLE SOLO KD SHOWS IN NEW ENGLAND: It’s good practice to play solo show every now and then to keep one’s self honest, so I’ll be the whole show on 3/12 at Club Passim in Cambridge, MA and 4/10 at the Word Barn in Exeter, NH. There will be plenty of room to play old chestnuts, field requests, go on tangents, or whatever the situation seems to suggest.

SIDE PROJECTS & EXTENDED-FAMILY NEWS:
One of the most exciting parts of recording my new, as-yet-untitled record was having Màiri Chaimbeul in the band. Màiri is an extraordinary Celtic harp player from the Isle of Skye, and her band Aerialists has a new record out which is mesmerizing, sideways, outside-the box traditional-based music. Check out Dear Sienna wherever you harvest your music.

My friend Alastair Moock is a Grammy-nominated kids’ music maker (the kind of kids’ music that is pretty much just Good Music, for whoever’s on hand to listen, kid or not) and I was honored to sing a bit on his newest one, Be a Pain, a collection of great songs celebrating activism and leadership. Moock has a crowdfund going right now to finish paying for the record and to enable him to offer it, in both live and recorded form, to kids at underserved schools, so that they can go out and change the world. Take a look and maybe lend a hand.

Last heads-up for this month is my bud Miss Tess’s brand new one The Moon Is an Ashtray, out February 7. Tess is a comprehensive badass and this record is gonna be a beauty.

Thanks everyone and hope to see you west coasters out on the town(s) in a few weeks!
Undisputedly yours, *kd

UPCOMING SHOWS:

FEBRUARY 20 - Crepe Place, SANTA CRUZ, CA Tix
FEBRUARY 21 - Hopmonk Tavern, NOVATO, CA Tix
FEBRUARY 22 - Amado’s, SAN FRANCISCO, CA Tix
FEBRUARY 23 - Feist Vineyards, SUTTER CREEK, CA Tix
FEBRUARY 26 - Bunk Bar, PORTLAND, OR Tix
FEBRUARY 27 - Sylvia Arts Center, BELLINGHAM, WA Tix
FEBRUARY 28 - Victoria Listening Room, VICTORIA, BC Tix (email for info)
FEBRUARY 29 - Ballard Homestead, SEATTLE, WA Tix

MARCH 12 - KD solo @ Club Passim, CAMBRIDGE, MA Tix
APRIL 10 - KD solo @ Word Barn, EXETER, NH Tix

tix/info for all shows http://krisdelmhorst.com/tour

JANUARY NEWSLETTER

IN WITH THE NEW // 30A FESTIVAL // WEST COAST

2020. A very sci-fi number. I’m into it.

My favorite thing about 2020 is that, barring unforeseen circumstances, I’ll have a new record ready to share. In many ways it’s a complicated time in history to be a music maker, but the prospect of releasing new songs into the world is no less exciting that it’s ever been and I absolutely can’t wait til this new batch can get out there and start mingling. In the meantime, there are many behind the scenes preparations to tackle, and I’ll be playing a few shows here and there so as not to forget how.

30A: January’s only entry into the tour calendar is the 30A Songwriters Festival. Now let me be clear, I am a huge fan of winter, the deeper and darker and snowier the better; but there is absolutely nothing wrong with a few days in a warm place now and then to keep things in perspective. This fest takes place in dozens of venues strung along a beautiful part of Florida’s panhandle, and lots of friends will be there, and all in all there’s very little to object to about the entire situation. It looks as though I’ll be playing the following sets down there, if anyone is keeping track:
Coastal Dune Co - Friday 7:30pm
Rosemary Beach Town Hall - Saturday 6:30pm
Fish Out of Water - Sunday 6:00pm

WEST COAST FEBRUARY: It’s been an upsettingly long time since I managed to get myself to the west coast. I’ll be out in the fall for a full-on album release tour, but in the meantime I’m sneaking out for a brief run of duo shows, accompanied by Austin Nevins. Currently confirmed CA dates are 2/20 at The Crepe Place in Santa Cruz, 2/21 at Hopmonk Tavern in Novato, 2/22 at Amado’s in San Francisco, and 2/23 at Feist Vineyards in Sutter Creek. These are all small comfy rooms, and we strongly recommend getting tickets early. PACIFIC NORTHWEST PEOPLE: we’re currently trying to finalize a few dates out there the last weekend in February, and it is putting up a good fight, but we’re hoping to prevail. Out of everyone on the planet, you are the best at sending love notes and noodges for me to come out there, and while I can’t yet promise that it will happen this winter I CAN promise that we are focusing efforts on making it so. Any amount of burnt offerings you feel like sending up to the cranky deities of calendars and scheduling can’t hurt. Southern Californians, you’re not on this trip, but we will most assuredly bring you the new record in the fall so sit tight.

SIDE PROJECTS & EXTENDED-FAMILY NEWS:

WE’RE WITH DINTY: Since Dinty Child seems to be either cousins, former bandmates, or old friends with about 85% of the population, you probably know all this already, but to recap: Dinty is a force of good in the world in every conceivable way. He’s usually found playing as a sideman, on any instrument handy, bringing deep musical chops and homeopathic doses of wild abandon to any situation. But now he’s releasing the first album of his own music, and the songs are great - catchy, joyful, and smart. I wrote the title track, as a drunken late night love toast to my songwriter buds, but Dinty quickly adopted it and raised it up right, and you’d never know it wasn’t one of his own. Lucky Ones is being Kickstarted right now and will come out later this month. Check it out to preorder/support this noble venture.

Yours from the future, which is apparently now, *kd

UPCOMING SHOWS:

JANUARY 17-19, 2020 - 30A Songwriters Festival, SANTA ROSA BEACH, FL Tix
FEBRUARY 20 - Crepe Place, SANTA CRUZ, CA Tix
FEBRUARY 21 - Hopmonk Tavern, NOVATO, CA Tix
FEBRUARY 22 - Amado’s, SAN FRANCISCO, CA Tix
FEBRUARY 23 - Feist Vineyards, SUTTER CREEK, CA

tix/info for all shows http://krisdelmhorst.com/tour