PUTNEY — Next Stage Arts Project and Twilight Music present Prince Edward Island-based, acoustic, folk/fusion trio Ten Strings and a Goat Skin, plus Boston-based singer/songwriter Hayley Reardon, at Next Stage on Friday, Aug. 5, at 7:30 p.m.
According to a news release, “Ten Strings and a Goat Skin transform tradition with vigor, curiosity, and sparks of goofy humor, weaving old-school Franco-Canadian, Breton, Irish, and Scottish tunes with wickedly current grooves and clever quirks.”
The young, bilingual trio expands on the Scottish and Acadian roots of PEI's traditional music, infusing sometimes moody, sometimes high-energy, original and traditional songs with pop and world rhythms.
Their new CD “Auprès du Poêle” (“Around the Woodstove”) highlights this cross pollination. Working with producer Leonard Podolak of Grammy- and Juno-winning eclectic roots favorites The Duhks, they push their music into new, dynamic, and engaging territory.
Ten Strings and a Goat Skin's rapid rise to prominence on the folk circuit began in Canada, with brothers Rowen and Caleb Gallant (fiddle and percussion) joining schoolmate Jesse Periard (guitar) to explore new approaches to arranging traditional songs and tunes. They soon began writing songs and expanding their audience to the United States.
With a voice that is distinctively rich and a contemplative sincerity in her songwriting, Hayley Reardon boasts a lyrical and melodic weight far beyond her 19 years.
The Boston Globe Magazine named Reardon a Bostonian of the Year in 2012 for both her music and her work to pair it with a message of teen empowerment, calling her “a confident, radiant teenage singer/songwriter who is helping to pen the next chapter of the Boston folk scene.”
Reardon's appearance in the award-winning documentary “For The Love of the Music: The Club 47 Folk Revival,” which won Best Documentary at the 2012 Boston International Film Fest, has linked her to an extended lineage of matriarchs and patriarchs of the folk movement of the 1960s. She has shared the stage with the likes of Tom Rush, Peter Yarrow, Buskin & Batteau, Christine Lavin, and Lori McKenna.