The me&thee coffeehouse begins its 38th season with a dynamic pair of singer-songwriters who have been steadily making a mark on the landscape of New England acoustic music: Kris Delmhorst and Mark Erelli. A genre-bending performer, Delmhorst feels comfortable with many different forms of music. Erelli, most recently associated with western swing and roots music, now turns his songwriting skills outward to sing about hope during these difficult times. Both performers will do their own sets and perhaps contribute to each other’s offerings during this special night of music.

Delmhorst is on the road to promote her latest recording. “Strange Conversation” is her fourth studio release and it’s clearly a turning point in her career. This CD is a vital and celebratory meditation on art and its ability to speak across time and space. Kris was inspired to write the songs when she came upon an anthology of poetry. Some of the poems are set verbatim to music, some dismantled and reassembled in significantly new renditions, others merely used as the jumping-off point for Delmhorst’s own literate lyrical take.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Delmhorst now hangs her hat in small-town New England, although her musical base remains Cambridge Mass., where she lived for many fruitful years. Her time there yielded two critically-praised albums made in collaboration with Morphine’s Billy Conway and a colorful crew from the Boston scene. “Songs for a Hurricane” (2003) was a moody journey through emotional weather, swirling with dark, jangly guitars and shot through with bright rays of folk and bluegrass. “Five Stories” (2001) employed a wide palette of instruments — from octave mandolin to baritone sax and melodica to flugelhorn — to bring to life a nuanced and timeless collection of songs.

 

Mark Erelli’s path to his latest album, “Hope & Other Casualties,” also came about in an organic and natural way. Erelli proudly wears his heart on his sleeve, but unlike the flotilla of “emo” currently controlling the airwaves, he is not afraid to turn his eyes outward. Effortlessly balancing songs of love and protest, resignation and redemption, “Hope” is a brave tour de force which cements Erelli’s reputation as one of today’s best young singer/songwriters. Scott Alarik wrote in The Boston Globe that the album is “an intimate masterpiece, at once his prettiest, most personal, and most political recording.”

“Hope” began with “The Only Way,” a passionate declaration of life in post-9/11 America, written soon after the event. A long incubation followed, during which Erelli recorded two albums, toured internationally, and settled in Portland, Maine. He taught himself to play steel guitar and mandolin, and experimented with western swing stylings on 2004’s “Hillbilly Pilgrim,” and roots music on “The Memorial Hall Recordings” in 2002. All that while, “Hope” simmered. Recorded slowly during a year of rough-spun basement sessions with producer Lorne Entress (Erelli played eleven instruments, Entress seven), “Hope” is an urgently personal album by a musician who finds that he can’t put away the news when he turns off the television. His own problems coexist against the backdrop of global dilemmas. The album mixes meditations on Iraq and poverty with poignant ballads about our debt to future generations. Erelli wraps his message in soulful singing and catchy hooks, with an upbeat, rootsy pulse that makes you want to listen.

 

 

Drawing from sources as diverse as Browning, Byron, Whitman, cummings and Rumi, [in her album “Stange Conversation” Delmhorst] crafts an impeccable, stylistically diverse cycle that celebrates both language and melody, and all of the sweet spots where they intersect. Alternately moody, euphoric and transcendent, this is the smartest good time you’ll have with a disc all year.  Los Angeles Daily News

[Erelli’s newest recording is] a sturdy, winsome album, fueled by politics and emotion, rooted in folk’s earnest chord changes and storyteller tradition but infused with the urban sensibilities of a contemporary singer-songwriter.  The Boston Globe