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.

Belonging To The Song: Andrew Calhoun Returns To PoemAlley With More Words, Music & Perspectives

Folk singer and poet Andrew Calhoun returns tonight after two years to regale PoemAlley and Curley’s with readings and live music from 2011’s Grapevine, a solo-performed tribute to formative influences like Martin Carthy on his life and music, featuring, respectively, restored and historically updated performances of “Oh, Susanna” and “Patrick Henry” and 2013’s Living Room (with vocal contributions by his daughter Casey). Here’s a duet performance from 2013 of Andrew’s original composition “Peach Song” below:

 Both of these titles, along with the Scottish ballad collection Telfer’s Cows (2004), Tiger Tattoo (2003) and 1993’s Hope, among many others, are available through Andrew’s artists’ cooperative Waterbug Records. Check out his own and the music of other bardic artists at the 23-year-old label here.

Broadly praised over the years by critics from the Chicago Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press-Dispatch to Performing Songwriter for his keen use of imagery and the sensitivity of his challenging, perspective-jumping performances, Andrew’s writing also embodies these attributes, collected in titles like 1989’s Twenty-Four Poems. Suffused with careful comparisons, the piece below delights in love’s paradoxical wont to leave us each unmoored in time while also honoring the personal history of the beloved, expressed in acts both gentle and dramatic:

When We Make Love

© Andrew Calhoun

It is the sweetness of raspberries growing
Full in the sunshine
Near a salt tossing ocean
Easing up and down between continents,
Pregnant with mystery

When we make love
Sunken treasure rises to the surface
Breaking free, rocking endlessly,
Blissfully disappearing,
Giving itself away

When we make love
It's the hush in the theatre
Before the curtain
The promise made and kept in the same moment
A poem composed in a dream
Remembered in a dream

When we make love
We belong to the song
Where I kiss your resistance
Through halls of childhood
Through walls of adolescence
Through trials of womanhood
And at last you know

With our bodies exploding in gentleness
With great winds whistling the treetops,
Quick as a tomahawk,
You and I
Together
In past, present and future

You know
It is you that I love
When we make love

The influence of Woody Allen and Groucho Marx comes through The Trilogy Trilogy (2012), Andrew’s first book of humor, containing numerous vignettes with intriguing and easily-relatable titles like “Because I’m Neurotic” and “Sweating the Big Stuff”.

"...A Poet Out Of A Man": An Evening With Andrew Calhoun At Curley's

 

As tonight’s guest writer/performer, New Haven-born folk singer Andrew Calhoun will share poetry, music, as well as selections from his new humor book, The Trilogy Trilogy (Waterbug, 2012).

Andrew’s formative roots with poetry go back to age seven, when he received a nickel from his mother after successfully memorizing Yeats’ “Song of Wandering Aengus.”

Five years later in 1969 saw him writing his first songs for guitar and subsequently becoming a fixture of the folk scene in Chicago, where he still resides. A few years later, he was well-rewarded for the considerable effort it took to see Martin Carthy live at the Cambridge Folk Festival in the UK, as Andrew still counts him and Leonard Cohen as profound influences on his own career. Andrew has gone on to tour internationally, from entertaining audiences in the intimate settings of pubs and folk clubs, to participating in house concerts and large-scale festivals.

Like his mother, he has passed on his love of words, voice and music to his daughter, Casey, with whom he founded (along with Victor Sanders and Gary Cleland) Zozo, an acoustic/electric folk quartet that started performing in 2010. Below is the Calhouns’ version of 1908's "Shine On Harvest Moon" by Jack Norworth & Nora Bayes:

While he has recorded to date more than ten albums, many through the Hogeye and Flying Fish recording companies, Andrew created Waterbug Records in 1992 as an artist-run alternative folk label. The Waterbug cooperative has since amassed 100 titles in its catalog, extending the brightest singer-songwriters and folk musicians to an international audience.

Enjoy this haunting interpretation of "A Musical Instrument," Elizabeth Barrett Browning's last poem, one of the 14 songs on his latest CD, LivingRoom (Waterbug Records, 2013):

Among his literary releases are Twenty-Four Poems (Psychological Bagpipes Press, 1989) and Hay (The Paper Airplane Press, 2005). The following whimsical piece of prehistoric empathy and the sometimes- ossifying nature of modern relations comes from Andrew’s homepage:

The Brontosaurus

© Andrew Calhoun

The brontosaurus slinks through the jungle,
Afraid to be seen;
A difficult proposition, when you weigh up to 35 tons,
But perhaps that makes it easier;
No one expects to see a brontosaurus.

Sometimes I wish I hadn't seen her
Consigned to a loneliness relative to hers,
I cannot have a prehistoric lizard in my house
No matter how sweet she is
Huge and hugely dear to me

I know! She pummels with her front legs,
Dispatching her foes with a blow of her mighty tail.
Understand this:
I would rather the brontosaurus tear me limb from limb from limb
Than have brunch with you again on Sunday.
I'd as soon she knock me screaming off a mountain
As sit through tomorrow's meeting.

No bravery.
The truth is,
I believe in the kindness of the brontosaurus.
Compelled to trust her,
Not knowing if I lead or follow
In her search for water;
Perhaps I am a dinosaur also.

“A true voice of poetry and lore” according to Jon Hogan, Andrew Calhoun posts information on his music, poetry and upcoming engagements at www.andrewcalhoun.com (don’t forget to check out the CDs of other folk artists in the Waterbug collection here). Get to know more about his career and social--as well as musical--passions in this festival interview: