10/27 Darlingside with Field Guide at Cedar Cultural Center

Tour Dates

10/28 – Chicago, IL – Old Town School
10/29 – Ann Arbor, MI – The Ark
11/29 – Charlottesville, VA – Southern Café
11/30 – Washington, DC – Howard Theatre
12/01 – Ardmore, PA – Ardmore Music Hall
12/02 – New York, NY – Brooklyn Made
12/03 – Saratoga Springs, NY – Little Spa Theatre
12/06 – Hamden, CT – Space Ballroom
12/07 – Portland, ME – Portland House
12/08 – South Burlington, VT – Higher Ground
12/09 – Cambridge, MA – The Sinclair – Early
12/09 – Cambridge, MA – The Sinclair – Late
12/15 – Northampton, MA – Academy of Music

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Darlingside

Acclaimed indie-folk quartet Darlingside is touring in support of their new album Everything Is Alive… stopping by the Cedar Cultural Center on October 27th.
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Field Music

Field Music to open. We caught Field Music in Mar 2010 and said, “As I previously mentioned, I’ve never heard of Field Music, and I mostly requested to see them live because I liked Clientele
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One thing that the band members of Darlingside and Field Guide agreed upon was The Wienery is the place for a pre-show bite and it was definitely cold in Minneapolis on Friday night.

Field Guide aka Dylan MacDonald opened the evening with a solo set on acoustic and electric guitar. He is from Winnipeg. So the bracing winter winds that greeted him had little effect.

MacDonald has a new album Field Guide Tape Redux that had a circuitous production route. First, the vocals and guitars were recorded near Riding Mountain National Park in a wood-stove heated cabin. Bass and drums were added in Breakglass Studios in Montreal. Then overdubbing in Monarch Studios in Vancouver.

Singer/songwriters tend to sometimes sink into their feelings, but MacDonald’s songs were light, open with rays of sunshine peeking through. Like in “Me & You”:

And oo I know we can’t do this forever

Oo it feels good to be stuck together

“I’ll be honest with you,” MacDonald said halfway through his set. “I’m having a good time.”

He said it was good to be on the road and he found the time fruitful, already writing four new songs on tour. He even played one that he wrote the day before in which he tells a lover that: “I’m the sure thing” and “You are the only habit I don’t want to change.”

Darlingside is an Indie Folk band based out of Boston. They formed as a collective of seven members when attending Williams College, but eventually became a band of four in 2009 with Don Mitchell on banjo and guitar, Auyon Mukharji on mandolin and violin, Harris Paseltiner on guitar and cello and David Senft on bass and kick drums.

Senft is not on tour so Mukharji introduced Senft’s subs, they being Molly Parden on bass, Ben Burns on drums and Deni Hlavinka on keys. Mukharji even hilariously stated one nice thing he has done for the new members: He intended to lend his sewing kit to Burns. He politely asked for some of Hlavinka’s pretzels instead of stealing them. And he has yet to do anything nice for Parden.

Darlingside is on tour to support their latest album Everything is Alive, but Paseltiner said their tour also might as well be supporting Fish Pond Fish from 2020 for this is their first tour since the pandemic.

Darlingside has an interesting makeup as a band. Each member contributes to the songwriting. For a time they wrote at a climbing gym, but sustained too many injured fingers, which is inevitable in rock climbing, but not good when playing string instruments.

They also have no lead singer. Each band member may take a solo, but they are at their best when singing in vocal harmony, creating a sound that NPR’s All Songs Considered has described as “… exquisitely-arranged, literary-minded, baroque folk-pop.”

There is also a madrigal spirit in their construct. For a couple of songs they even eschewed their electric instruments and went into the crowd with only a guitar and violin to form a circle and sing. It was an intimate moment for no longer were there lights, a stage and separation. Instead a communal setting between the musicians and the crowd.