Zak Trojano, Sorcha Cribben-Merrill, & Lisa Bastoni

Zak Trojano is a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, a finger-style guitar player, a fly-fisherman, and a beer drinker. He watches more than he talks, the guy at the end of the bar nursing a drink while the afternoon light angles in, letting the conversation pile up around him like snowfall.

He grew up in New Hampshire, outside of town in a cabin built by his parents. His father was a drummer who held down a regular country gig, and nights after work he would loosen his tie and show his son the finer points of Ginger Baker and Elvin Jones. In New Hampshire they drove around in trucks, and Prine and Dylan cassettes showed up in most of those trucks. Zak made Eagle Scout, got his knots down. Then it was college and out, wandering the country from the desert Southwest to Great Plains until he ran out of money, washing windows to work up the bus fare home. After a while it seemed like he ought to write some songs, and he did: heavy songs with a light touch; an AM radio throwback voice and an intricate finger-style technique framed by a drummer’s rhythm and sharpened by years of immersion in the work of players as various as John Fahey, Merle Travis, and Chet Atkins.
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Sorcha Cribben-Merrill is a singer-songwriter from Maine with a voice of unexpected power and depth of presence. She writes stirring songs steeped in blues, folk, jazz and soul.

From haunting ballads to charming vignettes to funk grooves, her songs unveil “a suite of musical styles that shows a wide-ranging songwriting ability. . . witty verses with smart rhymes.” (Portland Phoenix)

Sorcha tours nationally solo, duo and with her band ‘Sorcha & The Clearing.’ She is equally at home performing in folk festivals, rock clubs, weddings and living rooms. A multi-instrumentalist who started writing songs on an old piano in the laundry room, she performs on guitar, banjo and ukulele.
Sorcha’s third studio album, Quiet, was co-produced with Jeff Oehler of Beehive Productions and was released in September 2016.
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After a break of about a decade away from music, a career change and two children, Lisa Bastoni has released The Wishing Hour (2017), produced by Grammy-nominated songwriter and producer Felix McTeigue (Lori McKenna/Anais Mitchell).

During her break from music Bastoni had a “job in a cubicle,” went to graduate school, became an art teacher and for the past few years has been raising two young children. While she was on a hiatus from music, Bastoni said she found inspiration. “I played just a handful of concerts in all that time, and thought I was done with music for good,” Bastoni said. “But one afternoon, while out for a walk around the neighborhood with the kids, I started to get ideas for song lyrics. And soon it was like a flood of song ideas – and as the songs started to come back, so did the desire to perform and record them.”

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