‘Like playing in someone’s backyard’
Lowell’s annual The Town and the City Festival has a special feel — and lots and lots of perfnodrmers
In what would turn out to be one of their last gigs before the pandemic, the chamber-folk band Darlingside played the second annual The Town and the City Festival in Lowell back in 2019.
“We really enjoyed it,” says Don Mitchell, one of the core members of the group along with fellow Williams College alums Auyon Mukharji and Harris Paseltiner. “It has the feeling of a homegrown festival that somehow ballooned into something bigger. It has a feeling like you’re playing in someone’s backyard.”
In fact, the group played in someone’s house of worship, Christ Church United, where they’re scheduled to headline once again on Saturday. With their pristine vocal harmonies and mostly acoustic instrumentation, they’ve been booked into many sacred spaces over the band’s dozen or so years together.
“It’s always fun to perform when you don’t have to add reverberation through the PA system,” says Mitchell, who lives in Waltham.
After a COVID-enforced hiatus, the promoter Chris Porter brought his annual two-day tribute back to his hometown in 2022. Once responsible for booking the Middle East in Cambridge, Porter decamped for the West Coast two decades ago, where he worked for Seattle’s music and arts festival, Bumbershoot. More recently, he’s curated the last several editions of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, a huge annual festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
This year’s Town and the City Festival (TACF) features some well-known headlining acts, including the eccentric English songwriter Robyn Hitchcock (who also headlined in 2022), the indie band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the festive Boston band Bermuda Search Party (formerly known as the Q-Tip Bandits), and a reunion of the ’90s alternative-power-pop trio Orbit. There’s also a comedy showcase and a visit from the literary performance series Earfull, featuring author Freda Love Smith (Blake Babies’ drummer) and musician/comedian/poder cast host Dave Hill.
As in past years, the festival — named after the late Lowell native Jack Kerouac’s debut novel — promises to be a discovery channel, too. Intrepid attendees willing to carve a path among the participating venues (including Warp and Weft, the Worthen House Cafe, Navigation Brewing Company, and the Overlook at Mill No. 5) are bound to encounter a new favorite or two.
Nearly two dozen of this year’s performing acts consider Lowell to be home, including indie-pop songwriter Colleen Green, the rock band Dog 8 Dog, the bluesy guitarist Evan Goodrow, and the band Everfiner, who call their brand of music “shimmer funk.” Guitarist Chris Walton will sit in with the latter at Zorba Music Hall on Friday, then play his own solo set at Gallery Z on Saturday.
“My musical background is weird,” says Walton, who grew up in Iowa. “I didn’t start writing songs until I was an adult. I grew up thinking I’d be some sort of classical composer, but I didn’t get along with that.”
Instead, he came to Boston to attend Berklee College of Music, where he honed his skills as a composer of hushed, soulful love songs.
“Marvin Gaye is a huge inspiration for me,” says Walton. When he plays with backing musicians, their music might be considered “off-jazz,” he explains, or “jazz-adjacent.”
For the band Fantastic Cat, this festival appearance will provide a warm-up of sorts as they prepare to release their second album. They’ll have a record release party on June 20 at the Sinclair. Forming as the pandemic project of four like-minded songwriters, they never expected to take it this far.
“All of us have been road-dogging for years,” says Western Massachusetts native Don DiLego, who owns the studio in the Poconos where the band (including Anthony D’Amato, Brian Dunne, and Mike Montali) recorded the demos that became their debut, “The Very Best of Fantastic Cat” (2022).
DiLego had long envisioned creating a band modeled after Golden Smog, the long-running side project of members of the Jayhawks, Soul Asylum, and othMidwest bands. When his new band of brothers agreed to play their first show in New York City, they realized they needed a name.
“All band names are dumb,” says DiLego, who spent some years in the 1990s around the Boston music scene. Having drinks one night in the East Village of Manhattan, they asked the bartender what they should call their band. Her reply: “Fantastic Cat.”
“She didn’t blink,” DiLego says.
“We all share a love of the old folk-rockers of the day — the Band, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the Byrds,” he says. “That blend of harmonies where you can’t quite identify who’s doing what.”
Because all four are guitarplaying songwriters, they take turns playing bass and drums.
“There’s a charm to it,” DiLego says, laughing. “We do all work hard at it. No one’s learning paradiddles on the snare, but it’s all in service to the song.”
For Darlingside, the Lowell gig will be the band’s first in several months, after a long touring season behind their 2023 album, “Everything Is Alive.” Founding member David Senft recently announced he would stop going on the road with the band to stay home with his growing family. The band has since taken the opportunity to expand, adding fiddler Isa Burke, formerly with Lula Wiles, and guitarist Ben Burns, whom they befriended at the 2019 TACF, when he was playing for the band Honeysuckle.
Darlingside’s intimate blend of voices works as an antidote to the carping and shouting of recent times, Mitchell believes.
“There is a joy in being part of something bigger, giving up control in order to gain some kind of a collective heft,” he says. “You can do more if you have a bunch of people all willing to trust. We want to make sure there’s space for everyone, that everyone is taken care of.”
It sounds like he would welcome a third invite to this community-minded festival.