For this series of articles, our writer Ty Maxwell will be documenting his tour of the Northeast, spanning from August 6th to September 8th. Maxwell will be writing reflections and insights into the process of booking and executing a DIY tour as an independent artist, the relationships that enable the whole enterprise, and the general day-to-day experience: the minutiae, difficulties and triumphs involved in touring as a solo musician.
Day Nine: Thursday, August 14th, 2025 – Sulis Space (Florence, MA) with Jetties, Norma Dream (featuring Nino Soberon)
I like to tell people when describing myself that I am, first and foremost, a music lover. I mean this as a distinguishing trait: while I have no problem self-identifying as an artist or songwriter or performer, I think it’s significant that I started out purely as a listener and a fan. Even a punisher! I’m a recovering punisher, for sure! Starting out, the dream for me wasn’t to be on the stage; the dream was to be in the crowd for the best bands ever. To this day, nothing, for me, is more euphoric than that.
I didn’t start playing an instrument or try to write songs or join bands until I was a teenager, with years of obsessing over music already in the rearview. I know many incredible musicians who’ve been playing practically since they started walking and talking; I’m regularly in awe of singers and performers who seem like music is deeper in their bones than it’ll ever be in mine. That said, I know that if you’ve been doing it for longer than you can even remember, you might have a more complicated relationship with music. Maybe you do it because you love it, maybe you do it because it’s just something you’ve always done — especially if you were expected to be excellent at an early age, like so many people I know who came up in classical pedagogy or otherwise found music to be more of a strict enterprise you had to do “correctly” (rather than goofily or creatively). What a way to treat a kid!
So it’s relatively easy for me to stay in touch with my fan-first approach, even as I get more involved as a musician and performer myself: I want to be blown away, and I’m fortunate enough to have that happen fairly often. And I was blown away last night. The show was at a shared artists’ studio, called Sulis Space, in a big building right across from the Mill River, flowing through the town. While waiting for the space to open, I witnessed several swimmers coming and going, heading down to the river or re-emerging, hair wet and wrapped in towels, to return to cars sneakily parked in the building’s lot. In just a week of touring, I’ve run the gamut venue-wise, and this was the first time playing in a space like this. It had a unique energy, definitely far off from what you feel playing a bar or a club or a house: less a space for music specifically – certainly less for entertainment – and more for art, magic, expression, contemplation, critical thought. A cozy dreamworld.
Norma Dream (on five-string open-back banjo, nylon string guitar, and octave mandolin) and Nino Soberon (cello) were the first to perform, and I feel unequipped to capture it in writing. It was less like seeing music played for you and more like you’ve been waiting to see the Northern Lights your whole life, and then you accidentally stumble upon them, somewhere they’re definitely not supposed to be. Norma is an unbelievable singer and performer, ancient and otherworldly, reminding me of John Jacob Niles almost – she’s a beguiling stylist, drawing on myriad traditions, marked by drama, beauty and strangeness. She’s demonstrative, with penetrating eyes, projecting her voice to the back wall. We talked after the show about “genreless music,” a notion I’ve taken to mean that no one genre can quite encapsulate the artist, and Norma is absolutely like that, utterly singular but pulling from recognizable styles. She’s learned firsthand from great Kentucky banjo players, and I’ve never once heard someone incorporate the range of those techniques – the breakneck up-picking, the two-finger style practiced by Morgan and Lee Sexton – while singing in such an expressive, narrative, dramatic manner. (She jokingly referred to her music later, talking after the show by the river, as “Emily Dickinson-core”, which I find apt: her lyrics were lavish.) But it was her chemistry with cellist Nino Soberon, and the sum total of their powers, which really destroyed me; on the instrument, Soberon has endless expressive depths, matching the rhythmic fervor of Norma’s banjo one moment, evoking flutes with bowed harmonics the next. He was an orchestra unto himself, improvising countermelodies that were like a second great singer weaving in. Together, they played with a focused intensity, intonating to one another with a deep attention that was straight-up dazzling.
It all felt so out-of-time, like they’d walked out of a portal into the room. The two of them performed unamplified, seated close together, the small audience scattered on yellow mats. I found myself moved by the sight of their hands occasionally touching when Soberon would slowly draw his bow as far as it would go, coming into accidental context with Norma’s fretting hand. It was an at-times overwhelming performance in its emotional force. I’ll be thinking about it for the rest of the tour.
Days Ten and Eleven: Friday and Saturday, August 15th-16th, 2025 – Spruce Coffee (New Haven, CT) with Sinecera and Allie Brunet & The Proven Winners; Frog’s Spot (House Show) with Kinickey Hickey
Now that the trip is really in full swing, I’m thinking about the way I’ve been presenting it, the details I’ve included and the things I’ve left out. It has been great so far, but not everything has gone according to plan or been ideal; some shows have been unexpectedly great, others mildly disappointing for one reason or another. A lot can go wrong, whether it’s bad sound, a room that just isn’t right for your music, or a too-late night featuring an overtired audience. You accept what you get and give the best you can, and keep moving.
Incidentally, and this was totally unintentional, the August portion of my tour contains practically every kind of venue. I’m crushing it at tour bingo: so far I’ve played the upstairs back room at a restaurant, a rooftop bar, a backyard, a living room, a proper listening room with professional sound, an artists’ studio, a coffee shop, and a basement. Today I’m playing in a barn; next week we’ve got an art gallery, a house show, and a cafe on an island. The lack of uniformity is keeping me on my toes and really demonstrative of how different folks, running different spaces, approach throwing shows and events in their own unique way. There are certain drawbacks to doing it this way, but if nothing else, when a show doesn’t go great, I know that the next one will be something else completely.
Waking up alone in the Sulis Space on Friday morning, I packed up my equipment, locked up, found a coffee shop to write in, then went swimming for a few hours at the Mill River across from the venue. While there I met several fellow travelers, some from New York City, some from Toronto. We swapped travel stories and recommendations for other swimming holes in the region. Then I hit the road for New Haven – another very easy drive – listening to albums all the way through and dreaming of pizza.
Back in July, I came to New Haven to play at Never Ending Books, in the East Rock neighborhood, with the Sam & Louise Sullivan family band; coincidentally, Spruce Coffee, my venue for this tour, is just around the corner. I hit Modern Apizza for dinner – right in between – as a special treat, because I’m a Connecticut boy and the pizza here is GOATed, and yes I’m biased about it. Got blessed with perfect weather again, lots of folks out looking for action. I’d originally schemed to let today be a day off and come to New Haven early to visit with friends, but was fortunate to get added last-minute to this pre-planned show through some speculative Instagram DMing. It turned out Sinecera, aka Quinn Pirie, and I have played a bunch of shows together back in the day, when he was drumming in Bilge Rat and I was playing guitar in Bad Heaven. My addition to the bill was, by all accounts, a bit of an afterthought, and I felt a little out of place.
The highlight of the weekend was definitely my gig the next night at the basement of Frog’s Spot. It was the first basement show of the trip, and everyone who came out were seemingly friends and in high spirits, kicking off the evening with a backyard hang and potluck (shouts out to Joe Katz for grilling and preparing so much delicious food) before descending the stairs for the music. There was some sweet reunion energy in the air for me, too: I did my undergrad at UCONN, and last night I got to see a handful of punk scene friends I haven’t seen in years, not since I lived in Connecticut.
Kinickey Hickey (featuring an old acquaintance from my college days, who I used to always see at shows but never saw play before) started things off with a funny, sweet and disarming set, their three members moving the mic stand around to take turns singing lead. It was a direct window into their friendship, so endearing that it was impossible not to just let my guard down. Sometimes these intimate house shows, with no lights and minimal or zero amplification, feel like what I jokingly call “adult talent shows,” but this one rose above that: I played a ton of new songs, got most of the room to enthusiastically participate with me during improvised banter-zone bits, and it all ended with the audience egging me on to do one last song in the backyard, transitioning seamlessly back into the cookout-hangout thing. The level of care, intention and curation my friends who hosted the show provided is not the norm, and I’m so grateful to them for it.
After the show, a group of us went out to Three Sheets, a bar near downtown, where there was an art show in the back room and ambient jazz out front, then went dancing at Cafe 9, for their recurring post-disco HEAVEN dance party. We even got some of the bike co-op punks to come out and boogie to ABBA, which I’m told is a rare sight. Something was in the air. I’m saying an emphatic “yes!” to almost every potentially fun thing that falls into my lap on this trip, and it keeps paying off.
