Hi folks,
Summer is flying by and we hope you’re all well and enjoying yourselves.

This coming weekend, on August 13th, we look forward to playing at the 6th annual Cur-ville Dog Days Festival in Kenwood. We’re happy to be invited back to this down home, high quality, back yard music festival. We’ll play as a duo at 3:00, right after our friend and Cur-ville host, great singer/songwriter  Dale Henry Geist and right before the famous singer/songwriter and dear friend, Michael McNevin entertains us. (NOTE: The schedule has just changed after I posted and sent this out. Due to JL Stiles needing to leave early for another gig, we’ll be playing at 8pm instead of 3pm.) There will be great music all afternoon and into the evening. There’s plenty of room to camp and a nice campfire where we’ll all be jamming into the wee hours. There is no fee to get in but they encourage donations to help cover their costs. There will be free beer and it’s a potluck, but there will also be food for sale. We hope to see some of your familiar faces there!

We’ve been keeping really busy with music every weekend lately. Last weekend we played a wonderful private blackberry picking party in a beautiful place. We’ve been invited back to play there three years in a row now. What a treat! After that we played around the campfire at a good friend’s 70th birthday party. The next day we had planned to stay home for a change.. but we woke up to a surprise phone call from our friend Ginger who had two extra tickets to the MUSE concert!  So we went with her family and had a great time. What an experience!

The week before that we played the Calistoga Farmer’s Market on Michael’s birthday and he was thoroughly embarrassed by our friend Frederick making a big deal out of it. Thank you to all who sang to him and signed and generously contributed to the nice birthday card!

That same weekend we were invited to our good friend Christopher Smith’s home studio to do a little recording. We worked on six songs and felt like we’re finally making some progress on our 2nd CD which we’ve been meaning to do for years.

Besides working our regular jobs, we’re still playing some care facilities occasionally on week nights. We’re also planning to go to the 30th anniversary of the Fall Strawberry Music festival over Labor Day weekend! Never a dull moment.

We’ll be back at the Calistoga Farmer’s Market on September 10th and at the Windsor Farmer’s Market on Sept 18th.

Enjoy the rest of the summer and be well!

Love, Lindalou and Michael

 

Hi friends,

We’re playing the Windsor Farmer’s Market as a duo this coming Sunday, July 3rd, from 10am to 1pm.
They’ll be having a quilt and flower show. This is a really nice little market. Hope to see you there!

We have several private things lined up this summer, but just a couple more public gigs.

We’ll  play the Calistoga Farmer’s Market on July 30th, (Michael’s birthday!) 9am to noon with our pals Dan Brunetti and David Chapman.

on August 13th, we look forward to playing at the 6th annual Cur-Ville Dog Days Festival in Kenwood. What an honor to be invited back to this down home, high quality, back yard music festival.

We had a great time at the Kate Wolf Memorial Festival. Many of our good friends were playing the main stage this year. Check out  Houston Jones and Stevie Coyle. They put on wonderful shows (as always!) and our friend Karl Kummerle was invited to play a couple of songs with them which was great!

Our dear friends Diane and Ziggy help host the Sunset Radio at the festival and have invited us to play the past few years. Diane says it’s becoming a tradition. The main stage music is broadcast all weekend so folks in their camps can tune in when they don’t make it out to the stage. During the breaks on the stage they invite various musicians to play. Diane and Ziggy keep inviting us back which we really appreciate!

Our good friend Terry Ann Gillette, who plays fiddle on our CD, showed up on Sunday and surprised us. She and Karl had never met before but we invited them both to join us on Sunset Radio to play three songs. We had a great time and it was a joy to be accompanied by our two favorite fiddlers!

We’ll be continuing to play our local farmer’s markets and care facilities throughout the summer. We might also be available for more weddings, parties or any occasion where our music would fit.

Hope you and yours are all well and enjoying the summer! Have a happy Independence Day and thanks for supporting independent music!

Peace, Lindalou and Michael

 

 

Dear friends,
We have a couple of gigs coming right up. We’d love to see you.

This Wednesday, June 15th,  11am to 3pm
We’ll play an event at the Old Faithful Geyser in Calistoga. We’ll play as a duo focusing on familiar old time songs. This is actually a private lunch put on for a senior group in Calistoga called Creative Living. Warren Klima, who owns the geyser, generously puts on this event every year. We played there last year and it was a really nice event. The Geyser is open to the public, (with an entrance fee.) It’s a beautiful site, and you’re welcome to come enjoy the music.

The next day, Thursday, June 16th,  5pm to 8:00
We’ll be back at Elizabeth Spencer Tasting Room in Rutherford.
We were asked in April to play the first Thursday of every month, but friends of ours, Sweet Burgundy who I recommended, were only available on the first Thursday this month so they played then.
We’ll be playing there in the pet friendly courtyard with our good friends, fantastic fiddler Terry Ann Gillette and great guitar player Dan Brunetti. Come enjoy our music along with some exceptionally good wine.

On Saturday, June 18th, 9am to noon
Calistoga Farmer’s Market
We look forward to playing at our favorite farmer’s market again with Dan Brunetti and David Chapman.

We’re sure glad for a break in the rain. It’s finally  feeling like summer. Our garden is so happy to get some sunshine!

We were at the Strawberry music fest over Memorial Day weekend and had a great time despite the rain, sleet and even a bit of snow. Our young fiddler friend Karl Kummerle was there with us and got his second ‘tweener on the main stage! The first time was when he was twelve and our friend Duncan Draper got to accompany Karl on stand up bass back then. Now Karl is 17 and he got to play 3 songs on stage with great dobro player Michael Witcher whose brother Gabe has been a big inspiration to Karl with his exceptional fiddle playing. Here are some links to Karl’s songs at Strawberry   “Jerusalem Ridge ,”    “an old Scottish tune” (our favorite!) and “Old Dangerfield“  We were all there cheering him on under the drizzling sky. As soon as he started to play, a rainbow appeared over the meadow!

We’re getting ready for the Kate Wolf Music fest where several of our good friends will be playing the main stage this year! We look forward to camping, dancing, swimming in the river and playing music with friends all weekend. If you come you can find us camping near our friend Alan’s famous candle chandelier which is hard to miss, especially at night.

Hope you’re all well too- and find time to get out and soak up some music!

Love, Lindalou and Michael

Hi folks,
We just wanted to let you all know we’ll be playing music again tonight, May 5th, in Rutherford. We had a great time playing with our band last month at the Elizabeth Spencer Tasting Room. It’s a really nice place and they were serving delicious appetizers and high quality wine. They asked us to come back and play on the first Thursday of every month. Yay!

This month they’re celebrating their five year anniversary and they’ll have new music every Thursday night. This event is free! I had posted earlier that it was $20.00 to the general public because that’s what it was for last months event, but I was mistaken!

So here’s where we’ll be playing this week:

Thurdsay, May 5th 5:00 to 8:00pm
Elizabeth Spencer Tasting Room
With Dan Brunetti, Duncan Draper and Terry Ann Gillette

Saturday, May 7th 9:00am to Noon
Calistoga Farmer’s Market Opening day with the 3 D’s!
Great musicians, Dan Brunetti, David Chapman and Duncan Draper

We hope to see some familiar faces!
Happy Spring,
Lindalou and Michael

Dear Friends and Music Lovers,

March was an amazing month for us but went by way too fast. We had an incredible trip to Baja, where we were kayaking on the Sea of Cortez and playing music on some beautiful remote beaches at night. Trudi Angell and Sarah Young are great guides and we’d highly recommend Paddling South. The only thing that could have made it better is if we’d just had another week or two! Perhaps next year!

We have some local gigs coming right up where we hope to see you if you’re in the area.

On April 20th,– 3:00 to 6pm.
Cal Mart Customer Appreciation Day!
Once again we’ve been asked to play at our local grocery store. Lots of fun and free samples. Our long time musical partner, Dan Brunetti will accompany us on guitar along with our good friends Ted Dutcher, stand up bass player extraordinaire and virtuoso young fiddler, Karl Kummerle.

On April 21st,  — 5:00 to 7:30 pm
Elizabeth Spencer Tasting Room in Rutherford.
This is a new venue for us and we’re excited to be accompanied for the first time in way too long by our dear friend, Terry Ann Gillette, fantastic fiddle, cello and mandolin player. Dan Brunetti and Ted Dutcher will also join us again. This event is free for their wine club members but costs $20.00 for the general public. (So join their wine club!)

On May 1st, –10:00am to 1:00pm
Windsor Farmer’s Market
We’re so happy to be asked to play on opening day of this nice market. We’ll play as a duo and hope to see you there!

On May 5th, — 5:00 to 7:30 pm
Elizabeth Spencer Tasting Room in Rutherford.
We’ve been invited back to play here on the first Thursday of every month! Terry Ann Gillette and Dan Brunetti  will also join us again and we might have Ted Dutcher or Duncan Draper on bass. This is a really nice venue with great wine and appetizers. Free for their wine club members, $20.00 to general public.

On May 7th, — 9:00am to noon
Calistoga Farmer’s Market
We’ll have at least two of the 3 D’s; Dan Brunetti and David Chapman accompanying us and possibly Duncan Draper. We may have some surprise guest musicians as well on this opening day of our home town farmer’s market.

This coming weekend I’m excited to be invited to Prairie Sun Studio in Cotati to record some flute tracks on our friend Ginger Parish’s new Lullaby CD. These are mostly original songs Ginger wrote for her son and from what we’ve already heard this will be a great CD for all ages!

With all the suffering, devastation and upheaval going on in various parts of the world, we’re extremely grateful to be where we are and hope to continue spreading music around as long as we can.

We hope you and yours are all well and enjoying the Spring. Hope to see you along the way!

Love, Lindalou and Michael

We have a couple of private gigs coming up and only one public thing this month before taking off on March 6th to go kayaking and entertaining on the beaches down in Baja with Paddling South!

On February 19th at 10am we’ll be playing at the Aqus Cafe with Festival of Friends! We hope to see you there!

We’ve been asked to Join our good friends at Cafe Azul on Saturday Jan. 22nd from 7 to 10pm. We’ll just play a couple of songs ourselves and we’ll join Festival of Friends on a few of theirs. Our friend Karl Kummerle will join us with his amazing fiddle chops! Festival of  Friends makes beautiful music and we hear that Cafe Azul is a great venue with good food. Located at 521 4th street downtown Santa Rosa. We hope to see you there!

Greetings friends,
The snow at our house that came on New Years Day melted quickly and the sun has been shining brightly. We hope you’re all well. Personally, we’re still recuperating from the holidays!  We got to spend time with both our wonderful families. On New Years Eve we were at a great party singing into the wee hours with a large circle of good friends and fine musicians. What a way to ring in the new year! Thank you to Phil and Devorah for continuing this tradition we’ve enjoyed the past several years.

We don’t have any public gigs lined up this month, only a few private things, but we want to let everyone know about our exciting plans for the 2nd week of March. We’ve been invited to play music on a sea kayaking tour down in Baja! Our friend Trudy Angell started a successful business down in Loreto many years ago, called Paddling South.  She’s asked us to join her tour and entertain on the beaches for a week! We’re really excited about this opportunity and  trying to prepare for it.  It would sure make it extra fun if more of our friends could come along! If anyone reading this is interested in signing up for this trip you can learn more about it here.

We’re always hoping to line up more music gigs early in the year. If you know anyone who is getting married, or having a party or any kind of event where our music would fit in, please give them our contact info. Thanks for keeping us in mind!

Hope to see you before long. Be well!

Best wishes for a peaceful, prosperous 2011!

Lindalou and Michael

Winter Greetings,
The end of the year is drawing near and we hope you’re all well! We’ve been playing much more music than we’ve been keeping you posted about. We haven’t sent a music newsletter for some time but have been trying to keep our website up to date. If you wonder what we’re up to, please check here for updates.

We have a couple of fun gigs coming right up where we hope to see some familiar smiling faces!

Wednesday December 15th 6pm to 9pm
The annual Pauper’s Feast at the good old Calistoga Inn
We’ll be playing with our friends Dan Brunetti and David Chapman in the dining room.

NOTE: As of 12/ 16 the Niles gig below has been canceled due to serious rain in the forecast. Not very inviting weather for wandering minstrels! We’ll post the new date as soon as we have it!

Saturday, December 18th noon to 3pm
Downtown Niles in Fremont
We’ve been invited back to play as wandering minstrels again!
We played there with our good friend and amazing songwriter Christopher Smith a couple of weeks ago. Had a great time and got a nice response. Our friend Michael McNevin has invited us back and this time we’re looking forward to being accompanied by our virtuoso fiddle playing friend, 17 year old Karl Kummerle, who we look forward to playing with more often!

We’ve got several private gigs coming up, but we’re not ready to quit our day jobs yet!

Last month we were inspired to post a collection of songs we recorded back in the 90′s. It’s a rough demo we hadn’t intended to release, but we felt compelled to share a few old songs, since we still haven’t managed to record a new CD yet. These songs can be listened to or downloaded for free here: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/79749
If you’re interested in hearing about recent exciting events that caused us to share these old unpolished songs you can read about it in last months post.

We wish you all the best for these shortest days of the year and hope for peace, love and understanding in 2011.
Happy Holidays!

Love,

Lindalou and Michael

Dear Friends,

We would like to express our sincere gratitude for the very generous anonymous donation we received through our Jamendo site! Thanks to our sons’ advice and help, we’ve been giving our music away there for a couple of years under a Creative Commons License. We’ve gotten some nice reviews and even got to go play in Germany last year! We hadn’t really received any donations though, until this week when we received 2000 Euros!  Wow, we are astounded and amazed! We can’t thank this anonymous benefactor enough. We have been struggling to pay our bills like so many folks, for a long time and this will really help. We would like to spend it on getting a new CD recorded, but unfortunately it will still be awhile before we have that done. So we just posted something new to you, but very old– recordings we’ve decided to share as a way to thank who ever was inspired to send us this donation. These songs were loosely recorded late at night back in 1999 in our friend Mike Walter’s home studio in the Santa Cruz Mountains. We actually consider this a demo and never intended to release it to the public, but under the circumstances, since we haven’t got any of our new material ready to release yet, we decided to share this with the Jamendo community and anyone else who cares to listen. This is not our best quality recording or performance, but the songs are all homemade, from the heart, except the traditional “The Water is Wide” written in the 1600’s (except for the lines we changed.)

Here is our newest release of old songs: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/79749 We hope you enjoy it despite the lower quality of these tracks compared to this album:  http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/23777

We have a few private gigs coming up in November and December but only have two public things lined up this season, so far.

On November 27th from noon to 3pm
We’ll be playing in downtown Niles where our dear friend Michael McNevin, singer/songwriter extraordinaire, has asked us to entertain on the main street as wandering minstrels with our good friend Christopher Smith. We’ll be in his Mudpuddle shop the night before where Michael M will play a concert and we’ll join him and his friends in a song circle afterwards.

On December 15th, We’ll be at the Calistoga Inn from 6pm to 9pm.
For the annual Pauper’s Feast. We’ll be playing with our pals Dan Brunetti and David Chapman. We hope to see you there!

In March it looks like we’ll be playing on a sea kayaking tour down in Baja! Our friend Trudy Angel who started a successful business down in Loreto many years ago, called Paddling South, has asked us to join her tour and entertain on the beaches for a week! We’re really excited about this opportunity and are trying to prepare for it. If anyone reading this is interested in signing up for this trip you can learn more about it here.

We hope you all have a Happy Thanksgiving. Thanks again for listening to our music and supporting independent musicians!

Love, Lindalou and Michael