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Parsonsfield - formerly Poor Old Shine with Special Guest Heather Maloney with Heather Maloney

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Parsonsfield (formerly known as “Poor Old Shine”) triumphantly returns to our Norfolk stage, where they recorded their first album nearly four years ago. The young quintet of CT natives has been busy bringing their blend of Americana all over the continent, breathing new life into the timeless musical tradition with powerful lungs and athletic performances. If you have yet to catch a Parsonsfield performance at Infinity Hall, here’s your chance to catch up with those who have. And those of you who have, will see you there!!

Parsonsfield

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www.parsonsfield.com

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Artist Bio

Parsonsfield's journey first began back in 2014 with the release of Poor Old Shine, an ecstatic acoustic collection recorded in the rural Maine town from which the band drew its name. Hailed by Folk Alley as "the most jubilant and danceable indie roots music this side of the Carolinas," the album (and the group's accompanying live shows) established them as a raucous force of nature, with The New York Times praising them as "boisterously youthful yet deftly sentimental" and No Depression raving that they'll "give you rich five-part harmonies one minute [and] sound like bluegrass on steroids the next." They followed it up in 2016 with Blooming Through The Black, a slightly more experimental outing that earned the band glowing reviews alongside dates with everyone from Josh Ritter and The Jayhawks to Mandolin Orange and The New Pornographers. That same year, the group saw their music featured in the hit AMC> series "The Walking Dead" and teamed up with the prestigious FreshGrass Festival to compose a score for the 1922 silent classic Nanook of the North, which they performed live alongside the film at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

By the time Parsonsfield began work on Happy Hour On The Floor, the band clustered back together in New England like the early days. "We'd been spread out for so long," says Alcorn, who penned roughly half the LP with Freeman. "Just being physically close again had a big impact on our writing process."

When it came time to record, the band converted an old barn in rural Connecticut into a makeshift studio, working with Davis to fill the space with an eclectic array of instruments from pump organ and piano to mellotron and Moog. Due to the raw nature of the room, the band built each song from the ground up, layering instruments one-at-a-time to beautiful, tempo-setting tracks designed by Davis.

"Recording each instrument individually pushed us to strip the songs down to their most fundamental elements," says Freeman. "At the same time, it pushed us to play more melodically and make sure that every part we included was indispensable. It led us to this new sound that I think we've always been searching for."

That new sound is plain to hear from the opening seconds of the album, which begins with the rousing "Paper Floor." Like much of the record to come, the track is driven by an infectious groove and an intoxicating mix of organic and electronic sounds that leaves plenty of room for Freeman's airy voice to shine. The lilting "Til I Die" mixes crisp finger-picking and Celtic strings with intentionally lo-fi production and dense vocal choiring, while the spellbinding "Running River" builds from an a capella vocoder intro into a triumphant full band climax, and the hook-filled "Now That You're Gone" comes from experiments with bass ukulele run through radical effects pedals.

"When we started writing for this album, we decided to learn to play bass and split the duties depending on what each song called for," says Alcorn. "It turned out to really shape the way we wrote and recorded this album because we were all discovering the possibilities of this new instrument. Everything on the record feels groovier and more danceable than ever before."

And that's just the way Parsonsfield wants it. There's enough sadness and bad news in the world as it is, so they crafted Happy Hour On The Floor as an escape. The songs meditate on the little moments that define our day-to-day existence: the enchanting "River Town" finds joy in the simple things, while the breezy "Reykjavik Connection" celebrates the kind of bond that transcends time and distance, and the romantic "Sweet Dream" revels in the all-consuming power of love. It's perhaps the soaring "Emery," though, that captures the spirit of the album best. Beginning with a field recording of the birds that congregated outside the barn every day during the recording sessions, the track reflects on gratitude and perspective, on a definition of happiness and fulfillment that has nothing to with wealth or power or possessions.

"It's a song about the necessities in life, which, for the most part, aren't physical things at all," says Freeman. "It's about having nothing, but because of that, knowing that you have endless possibilities."

As Parsonsfield learned with Happy Hour On The Floor, sometimes less is more.

Heather Maloney

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www.heathermaloney.com

Massachusetts writer and song-singer Heather Maloney celebrates the release her 2018 EP, Just Enough Sun. The six songs (five new originals and a cover of Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall") were recorded as mostly single-take, live performances in a room where instruments bled into vocal mics and vocals into instruments. The result is a raw and deeply vulnerable collection songs that follow Maloney's literate and often heartbreaking exploration of family history, childhood dreams and the adulthood realities that butt-up against them; loss, misogyny, unrequited love, poverty, and even the moral dilemma of sending monkeys into space for the sake of science. The daughter of a psychotherapist and a carpenter, Heather's songwriting is equal parts introspective and relatable.

JUST ENOUGH SUN is released by the celebrated indie record label, Signature Sounds and co-produced by accompanist Ryan Hommel. The recording effortlessly captures Hommel and Maloney's dynamic live performances as a duo, with subtle instrumentation that lifts the songs up to new places without ever shifting the focus too far from Maloney's stunningly visceral voice and thought-provoking lyrics.

Maloney's 2015 record Making Me Break was produced by Bill Reynolds (Band of Horses, Avett Brothers, Lissie) and features an all-star backing band including members of Band of Horses (Bill Reynolds, Tyler Ramsey), The Wallflowers, My Morning Jacket, and Darlingside.

Upon the release of Making Me Break, Maloney landed on SPIN Magazine’s “Artist to Watch”, with enthusiastic reviews from The Huffington Post, Consequence of Sound, and No Depression. The last song on the record, “Nightstand Drawer”, became Maloney’s first major television song placement on the CBS series “Elementary”.

As a Signature Sounds artist, Maloney has toured nationally as a headliner as well as in support of acts like Lake Street Dive, Rodrigo y Gabriela, Gary Clark Jr., Colin Hay, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and many more. In 2014 she collaborated with the rising Boston quartet Darlingside on the Woodstock EP, a tribute to the Joni Mitchell-written / Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young-covered 60’s anthem. The cover was featured on the New York Times and garnered attention from Graham Nash himself, who called the performance, “Delicious, really excellent.”

Raised on a record player instead of a TV, Maloney dug deep into per parents’ record collections for entertainment, obsessing over the Beatles Joni Mitchell, Fleetwood Mac, C.S.N.Y., Bob Dylan, and more. So it’s no surprise that the folk, pop, and rock greats of the 60’s and 70’s found their way into her own music. With those influences as a foundation, and a strong dose of 90’s radio hits (from women like Fiona Apple, Alanis Morisette, Bonnie Raitt, Sheryl Crow, and of course, Mariah Carey), Maloney was forming her sound long before she even wrote a single lyric.  

According to her mother, her singing career began in the aisles of a Northern New Jersey grocery store, where she developed a reputation for serenading shoppers. The writing would come much later, after spending the first few years of her early 20’s in a state of self-proclaimed “Musical A.D.D.”. After training her voice in classical operatic, improvisational jazz and classical Indian vocal techniques, Maloney was suddenly and overwhelmingly compelled to drop all things musical. Actually, to quit making sounds or noise, altogether.

She found herself living at a silent meditation retreat center in Central Massachusetts, where she would practice for almost 3 years, studying and Vipassana Meditation, pouring over Rumi and Rilke, and keeping a journal documenting daily life at her cottage in the woods. It was in this place of quiet that, ironically, she began writing her first songs. Songs largely inspired by her experiences in meditation, including equal parts of the dark / uncomfortable / twisted parts of the human mind, as well as the sparkling and brief moments of that longed-for, ever elusive thing called insight. Maloney said that if she hadn’t started writing songs at the meditation center, she would be “completely covered in tattoos, because each song is about something I really, really want to remember badly … so I wouldn’t have to go through it again.”

And with the same sudden and overwhelming resolve that led her to the meditation center in the first place, she re-emerged into the music space with a guitar and a few songs that meant something to her. In the years since Maloney has left her life of silence and reflection, she has toured almost constantly, written hundreds of songs, and slept on over a thousand different pillows. 

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