A Favorite Returns Returns To "Our Pub"

Raves Phil Shapiro (host of the radio program Bound for Glory) of this Tuesday’s guest singer/poet, "Andrew Calhoun is a powerful songsmith, a quiet and sly performer, and fine traditional singer as well... fascinating and unpredictable." 

That unpredictability owes much to forty years’ dedication as a performer (and New Haven native) in building an ever-expansive, multi-genre range, from original material, Irish and American folk songs, to Scottish ballads (listen to tracks from his 2017 release, Rhymer’s Tower: Ballads of the Anglo-Scottish Border here), as well as African-American spirituals, hymns and musical adaptations of Mary Oliver, Robert Frost and other writers.

The spark was lit for Andrew in 1967, when he got his first guitar at age ten and began penning his own songs two years later, making his way into the folk scene in Chicago by the 1970s and finding profound lifelong influence in the works of Leonard Cohen and Martin Carthy. Click here and here for more about this period and other career details from Andrew's previous appearances at Curley's.

On the production side, Andrew founded WaterbugRecords in 1992, an artists' cooperative folk label, now up to 125 titles—appropriately enough, a valued channel for bringing some of the brightest singer-songwriters and folk musicians to an international audience by a performer who has become a renown musical fixture abroad, in his own right.

Below is his 2016 rendition of Robert Burns’ “The Lazy Mist”:

Besides various musical releases, including 2005’s Staring at the Sun (Songs 1973-1981), Shadow Of a Wing (2004) and Living Room (2013), Andrew has collected his poetry in Twenty-Four Poems (illustrated by Lee Broede) and Hay.  He has also received the Lantern Bearer Award in 2012 for twenty-five years of service to the folk arts in the Midwest by the Folk Alliance Regional Midwest, followed by the Lifetime Achievement Award, Woodstock Folk Festival in 2014.

The piece below is Andrew's interesting meditation on the low-key confluence between conviviality and territoriality.

Innsbruck

© Andrew Calhoun

In Austria
(We were there)
Boys came in
We were there first
But it was their pub

Handsome boys
Chanted and drank shots down
And shot darts with deadly skill
And drank draughts
With a laughing girl
Who looked to be in love with one of them
The one with hair as brown and thick as hers
They left before we did
But it was their pub

Check out his music, other writing, tour dates, as well as performances with his daughter, Casey at www.andrewcalhoun.com.