Fred Eaglesmith

Saturday, November 3, 2012

at the Spectator Auditorium

N.B. Individual tickets for Fred will be sold through the Spectator (not the Carnegie!) beginning the end of September.

Acclaimed singer, songwriter and bandleader Fred Eaglesmith is a genuine iconoclast and true original. It’s the natural result of following the cue of his musical career and now 19 albums with the January 2012 release of 6 Volts. The result is one of the most fascinating and musically rewarding careers in contemporary music.

As he has doggedly gone his own way as an independent musical artist, Eaglesmith has also enjoyed such high profile rewards in recent years as having his songs covered by country superstars Toby Keith, Alan Jackson and Miranda Lambert, among many other accomplishments.

Throughout the years since his first album in 1980, Eaglesmith has usefully managed to both transcend and blend such genres and categories as rock’n’roll, country, folk, singer-songwriter, Americana, blues and bluegrass to fashion his own distinctive brand of literate, melodic and rhythmic rocking elecro-acoustic North American music. Along the way he has gathered a unique set of accomplishments: a Juno Award for Best Roots & Traditional Album, had his music used in films by Martin Scorsese, James Caan and Toby Keith, wrote a hit #1 on the bluegrass charts (“Thirty Years of Farming,” recorded by James King), wowing David Letterman in his U.S. network debut in 2010, and finding his songs included in the curriculum at two colleges.

His followers are so devoted that he is the host and centerpiece of a number of music festivals in the U.S. and Canada. He also inspired the Roots on the Rails rolling music fests and hosts its excursions on scenic railways as well as, last year, at sea. When not writing recording and performing music, Eaglesmith creates visual art that is exhibited in commercial galleries and museums.

6 Volts is yet another landmark on a journey. The album takes its title from the battery that powered the game-changing transistor radio – introduced in 1954, the same year that rock’n’roll emerged into popular consciousness – and embodies the notion of back to the future. Captured live in the studio with one microphone onto a one-track reel to reel recorder like so many enduring classics, 6 Volts also bristles with contemporary urgency.