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Parsonsfield - Holiday Acoustic Tour

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Parsonsfield, a 5-piece folk/rock band from Western MA, make their return home to Infinity Hall Norfolk!! 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!!

“…bands like to talk about how they are innovating, but Parsonsfield actually delivers on that promise. Not only does their sound kick out the windows of what most people think of folk and bluegrass, but their new video raises a flag for the millennial generation.” ~Folk Alley

 

American Songwriter says their new album Blooming Through The Black “captures both the live energy the band has come to be known for as well as the sonic evolution that occurred…” in the studio. WNYC Soundcheck had the band in for a session recently, and say that “the quintet Parsonsfield is based in western Massachusetts, but their music draws on the string bands of Appalachia. At least in part. They also like to crank up the amps and pin your ears to the wall.”

 

Folk Alley says “a lot of string bands like to talk about how they are innovating, but Parsonsfield actually delivers on that promise. Not only does their sound kick out the windows of what most people think of folk and bluegrass, but their video raises a flag for the millennial generation.”

 

“...totally out of left field — comes the music of Parsonsfield, an eclectic American band which happily mingles bluegrass, folk, jazz and anything else that comes to mind. Not only does their sound make that biblical “joyful noise,” but the musicians themselves scamper around as though they were part of the cast of the Appalachian production of Lord of the Rings — the Musical.”  ~The Toronto Star

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.

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