Carrie Ferguson & Chris Scanlon in Concert

Carrie Ferguson grew up playing an enormous upright, chocolate-brown (to put it politely) piano inherited from the family of one of her father’s third-grade students. This piano, built from the parts of several old pianos by students in a local instrument-building workshop, had a darkly booming, slightly furry quality to it, not unlike the weather outside in her hometown of Arcata on the North Coast of California.  In order to write good music you had to play the way the instrument itself demanded, which to her ear meant sticking to the lower 2/3rds of the keyboard, and using plenty of rolling arpeggios and minor chords. Ferguson credits the stubborn and sonorous voice of her childhood piano, combined with the perpetual fog and exhilarating clamminess of coastal Northern California, as instilling in her the baseline aesthetic of melancholic optimism that still permeates her words and music today.

Chris Scanlon would like you to know that you don’t need to have come of age in New Jersey to connect to the stories and characters on his debut solo CD U-Turn. The themes he sings about are universal (or perhaps it’s just that so many of us have passed through New Jersey’s portals that they just seem so?). Scanlon, a former yet forever Jersey Boy himself, didn’t set out to write a song cycle about his youth in the Garden State. Still he thinks there’s a little New Jersey in all of us. He’s a songwriter with an enthusiastic following in Northampton, MA, a competitive music market. He moves easily from rock to folk, ballads to anthems, with a little scat and funk thrown in. In other words, Chris Scanlon is not your typical singer-songwriter.