Dan & Faith

Hello!

The garden is mostly done for the season, with the exception of the kale plants. Kale is one of those vegetables where you can go out to the garden in sub-freezing temperatures, snap off a few frozen leaves, and it will cook up just as nicely as it does in mid-summer. The trees are bare, and we can see the snow on the Vermont ski slopes. The humidifier is running, keeping both us and our instruments from drying out. Yet, with all of these harbingers of winter, a week or so ago we had a robin land on the porch rail and peer in the window. And two of our neighborhood foxes were frolicking behind the barn, which gives us hope that we’ll have another batch of fox kits in the spring!

We have exciting news — Faith has been selected as a Finalist in the South Florida Folk Festival’s 2024 Singer Songwriter Contest! Only ten finalists were chosen out of all the entries received, so this is a huge honor. We will be performing her entry songs, My Name Is George and Gator Gator, on the main stage at the festival in Davie, FL the first Saturday in February 2024. After that performance, three winners will be chosen to do an in-the-round performance on the main stage the next day. We’ll have more details about the festival in next month’s newsletter!

Holiday traditions hold a lot of meaning. One of our traditions is our annual trek to Worcester, MA to join DJ Nick Noble for his annual Folk Revival holiday show on WICN radio. This year, Nick’s holiday show is Thursday, December 14th from 7-10pm Eastern time. Musicians from all around the Worcester area will be joining Nick to share some holiday cheer and at least one holiday song each! In the Worcester area, tune in to 90.5FM, or you can go to WICN.org and click on “Listen Live”.

Our friend Aaron Tornberg formed One Broadway Collaborative back in 2021 as a public performance space for all genres of music and comedy. On Friday and Saturday, December 15th and 16th, One Broadway is holding a pair of fundraiser concerts by multiple musicians and comedians at the Spicket River Brewery in Lawrence, MA. The funds raised will go toward continuing the collaborative’s programming. We’ll be performing in the Friday evening show, which runs 7-11pm. The Saturday show is 3-7pm. Join us for some great entertainment, information about what One Broadway Collaborative has coming up in 2024, and great local beer and food!  Tickets are $15, and can be purchased here in advance, or at the door. Any additional donation to the collaborative is welcome.

One of the fun facts about the two of us is that our birthdays are two days apart (though we were born in different years). We tend to do our major celebrating on the day between. That’s when the cake gets baked, and any fancy dinner happens. For the last couple of years, that’s also when we’ve thrown ourselves an online birthday bash. We’re in the mood to do it again this year, too. Tune in on our Facebook page or YouTube channel on Saturday, December 30th at 7pm Eastern time and help us celebrate! We’ll be singing songs and telling stories for an hour or so, and we’d love your company.

The holiday season is well underway, which means the Winter Solstice is coming up soon. There are so many Christmas songs out there, and a bunch of Hanukkah songs, too, but not that many Solstice songs. Dan decided to do something about that, and thus his song Solstice was born. Please enjoy our Solstice lyric video, or you can download the audio recording. Chase away darkness, join in our song!

Music makes a great holiday gift! You can order a physical CD or download in any format you choose from our Bandcamp page.

Our albums Then and Now, Seeking, and Simple Grace are available from us at shows and on our website, through Bandcamp, or you can find them at iTunes and most other online music stores. Our music is also available streaming on Spotify and Apple Music.

As always, you can find additional schedule information on our website. For additional content and stories from the road, follow us on Patreon. For more frequent news updates and information, check out our Facebook fan page and follow us on Twitter (@danandfaith).

As we close out 2023, we hope that whatever holiday you celebrate is joyous, and that you have a happy and healthy new year!

Dan & Faith

Hello!

Last Saturday, we hit 74 degrees out, a delightful day. This past Monday morning, we woke up to an overnight low of 27 degrees, and our first frost of the season. Snow flurries greeted us on Wednesday morning! We were still harvesting zucchini from the garden last week, along with broccoli, peppers and tomatoes. We have a dozen acorn squash cleaned up and in a cool storage spot. They grew from the winter squash plants that we thought were butternut squash — oops! But acorn squash is tasty, too. Our kale is insanely huge, and will still be good for a couple of months if we leave up the portable electric fence; the deer love it, and only the fence prevents them from eating it all. Speaking of deer, in our neighborhood we have a buck, a doe, and two fawns (one yearling, one from this year) at a minimum (maybe more!), and they do a nightly trek back and forth along the edge of our yard on the hayfield side. We call it the nightly deer parade!

It’s a quiet month for us, gig-wise, but we have some videos available for your viewing pleasure.

Back in September, we recorded an interview with Rik Palieri on his Songwriter’s Notebook series up in Burlington, VT. Rik and Dan share a history of hanging around with Pete Seeger back in the day, and we’ve been friends with Rik for many years. He joined us on banjo for a few songs, plus we did a few with just us. A fun show! You can watch it here.

One of Dan’s songs from the February Album Writing Month project this year tells the story of an event that took place just north of us, across the river in Ascutney, Vermont. Romaine Tenney was a local farmer who was born on his family’s farm and took on the farm after his father died, leaving for only a 2 year stint in the army. He milked his cows by hand, and only had electric power in the barn because he needed it for the milk handling equipment; there was no electricity in his house. In 1964, the state took his farm by eminent domain when they were building a new interstate highway, I-91. They had picked up all of his farm equipment, and were going to be coming the next day to remove his cattle and move him out. That night, he let the cows out of the barn, tied his dog to a tree, and torched the barn. What he did next made headlines across the country. You can hear Dan’s telling of the story here.

This Friday, November 3rd, is Bandcamp Friday. On Bandcamp Friday, Bandcamp waives their revenue share to help support the musical artists who offer their music on Bandcamp. The holidays are getting closer, and music makes a great gift! You can order a physical CD, or download in any format you choose. And if you end up buying on a different day, that’s OK, too! Bandcamp is a wonderfully supportive organization that we’ve sold our CDs through for several years now.

Our albums Then and Now, Seeking, and Simple Grace are available from us at shows and on our website, through Bandcamp, or you can find them at iTunes and most other online music stores. Our music is also available streaming on Spotify and Apple Music.

As always, you can find additional schedule information on our website. For additional content and stories from the road, follow us on Patreon. For more frequent news updates and information, check out our Facebook fan page and follow us on Twitter (@danandfaith).

We’re starting to flesh out our schedule for 2024. Does your local library host concerts? If so, let us know! We’d love to play in your neighborhood.  Or better yet, we could play in your back yard or living room!  Learn more about hosting a house concert here.

Dan & Faith