How time flies

“I got sober in 1990 at age twenty-seven. A few years later, I started writing songs.” That’s how singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier begins the liner notes of her soon-to-be reissued, highly acclaimed album, “Drag Queens in Limousines,” which turns 25 this year. To promote the re-release (which is only now, in 2024, getting its first vinyl pressing), Grammy-nominated Gauthier is hitting the road and making a stop in the Valley that loves her. She will be at the Iron Horse in Northampton on Sept. 13, 25 years to-the-day of the album’s release. 

Gauthier, whose songs often tell the stories of societal “outsiders,” says that the tracks on “Drag Queens” “were the songs that helped me find my writer’s voice … many of (them) remain on my set list today.”

She funded the recording and manufacturing of the original 1999 “Drag Queens” with income from the Cajun-style restaurant she opened in Boston in the late 1980s. The album catapulted her success and earned her an Americana Music Award, International Folk Music Award, and Best Country Artist at the GLAMA awards (The Gay and Lesbian American Music Awards.).

“As of today, I am sixty-two years old and I have been a Nashville-based, professional songwriter for twenty-four years,” Gauthier reflects in the liner notes.

She shares the bill at the Sept. 13 performance with veteran singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks, whose latest, “Bluegrass Vacation,” is a return to his roots.

Fulks, who helped define the “alternative country” movement of the 1990s, sings of the troubles of common people — love, inebriation, divorce — while flatpicking and playing his banjo. 

Tickets range from $28 to $51 and can be purchased at ironhorse.org. Doors open at 6 p.m. and the show starts at 7 p.m.

Pop Champagne

For nearly every day of the month of September, Australian guitarist Daniel Champagne will perform in a different U.S. city — beginning in Decatur, Georgia, and ending in Boston. On Sept. 27, he makes a stop in Northampton at the Parlor Room. 

Champagne is a certified prodigy: he picked up the guitar at 5 years old, following in the footsteps of a musical father, and began writing his own songs at 12. At 30, he’s already released seven studio albums and performed at festivals around the globe. 

“You feel as if he just invented the instrument yesterday and was discovering its possibilities afresh,” music historian Ted Gioia said of Champagne. 

His style is rootsy, a combination of folk, blues and pop, and his virtuosic facility pairs nicely with his seasoned showmanship. 

Tickets range from $18 to $24 and can be purchased at parlorroom.org. The show starts at 7:30 p.m.

He goes to 11

Peter Blanchette is known around the world as the inventor of the 11-string archguitar, and is a musician of prolific scale: he has recorded on hundreds of albums, started his own label, Archguitar Music, and performed on some of the world’s most prestigous stages. Here in the Valley, we also know him as our neighbor.

Blanchette, who lives in Northampton and travels the world playing a host of styles, from medieval, renaissance and baroque music to his own original pieces, will perform at the Bombyx Center for Arts & Equity in Florence on Sunday, Sept. 22. 

He will be joined by acclaimed Irish singer Éilís Kennedy and another local favorite, violinist/violist Charlotte Collins.

Their performance will fuse Blanchette’s unique archguitar arrangements with Kennedy’s traditional Irish “gan tionlacan” (unaccompanied) songs.

According to the Bombyx website, the songs will draw “from Kennedy’s heritage in Baile an Mhúraigh, West Kerry, [amounting] to a sort of lyrical picture album of a genuinely musical and poetic family in the West Kerry tradition.”

Tickets are $20 in advance at bombyx.live, and $25 at the door. Doors open at 6 p.m. for the 7 p.m. show.

Tenor titan in our midst 

We are all lucky to be alive at the same time as the great tenor saxophonist Houston Person, who turns 90 later this year. Person, the keeper of the “Boss Tenor” flame, has been gigging since the mid-60s. His first big break came while working as a sideman with organist Johnny Hammond and his group, co-led by Etta Jones.

He’s recorded 75 albums under his own name on Prestige, Savoy and HighNote, to name a few, and has performed and recorded with generations of greats. 

His tone is unparalleled in today’s jazz world — big, deeply swinging, smooth, and he makes it sound so easy. 

He’s joining the Valley’s stalwart rhythm section, the Green Street Trio, at the Drake in Amherst on Wednesday, Sept. 25, as a part of the Northampton Jazz Workshop. 

Doors open at 7 p.m. and downbeat is 7:30 p.m. And, for the brave few, the second set opens up into a jam session — an opportunity to bring your axe and sit in with one of the living greats.

Cover is $15 at the door ($5 for students), and is free for those participating in the jam.

‘A peculiar indie group’

Deerhoof formed in San Fransisco in 1994 as an improvisational noise-punk quartet and went on to be one of the most influential indie bands of the 2000s. 

Their sound is experimental and joyful, catchy and erratic. At the front of the band is singer Satomi Matsuzaki, who joined Deerhoof within a week of moving to the United States from Japan in May 1995, with no prior experience playing in a band. 17 albums later, the band continues to record and tour.

They perform at Hawks & Reed Performing Arts Center in Greenfield on Tuesday, Sept. 24 and perhaps the venue’s website says it best: “Deerhoof is a peculiar indie group. Highly fun. 30 years old (not the band members, the band).”

Ekko Astral, a bubblegum noise punk band from Washington D.C., opens.

Please note: face masks are mandatory at this show.

Tickets range from $20 to $30, and can be purchased at www.hawksandreed.com. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. for the 8 p.m. show.