Festival Songs & Memory Lanes in Maine
The All Roads Music Festival started in 2015 as a way to celebrate and connect independent (i.e., non- or anti-corporate) musicians in Maine and from away. The weekend bacchanal happens in Belfast, a creaky and charming seaside town two hours’ drive up the coast from Portland that’s long been a haven for hippies and other radicals — the subversive artist, writer and physicist Bern Porter died there 20 springs ago (I’ve heard Jeff Tweedy’s a big Bern fan). Over 40 acts play various downtown venues on Friday night and Saturday (May 17 and 18 this year) in a wide variety of styles: folk, metal, hip hop, country, jam rock, bluegrass, psychedelic pop.
I grew up, and grew to love music, during the Cassette Renaissance of the 1980s, crafting 45-minute suites of songs on 90-minute tapes for lawnmowing and girlfriends. For all its faults (and they are profound and numberless), Spotify makes making a playlist a dream these days. Nearly all the acts playing All Roads this year have at least one track on the platform, so when I thought of engaging ways to share a lot of cool local music with you in anticipation of the festival (which The Bollard is co-sponsoring), it was an easy choice.
Making a coherent mix from nearly 40 very different acts: not so easy. I knew I wanted the theme to be a spring road trip, and for the compilation to be long enough to get to Belfast from Portland and back (with a break or two for bodily or other functions, like Wiscasset). So I interspersed songs by people playing this year’s fest with new and favorite music by Maine musicians. This way, if you like a song by an All Roads artist (nearly all of whom are from Maine), you can dive down the rabbit holes on either side for gems of a similar genre by current and former local recording artists.
As often happens when making a mix, unexpected themes emerged.
For example, everyone’s broke (at least “…Till Payday,” as Apollyon observes) and either late on rent, like Dead Gowns’ Geneviève Beaudoin, or skipping out on it entirely, like Alice Limoges. Dan Blakeslee has fled “a room full of suits” for the life of a wandering vagabond, but says he’s “got it pretty good here in the ditch.”
Borderlines is shouting about the folks working “a twelve-hour day for six-hour pay,” and technology ain’t helping. Limoges is also trying to escape her own smart phone in “Yellowstone,” Darksoft’s heart has been broken by an algorithmic tart (“Iloveyou”), so he’s also fleeing back to nature, and Lean Meats made an entire EP last year, Crusaders of the Web, about the perils of modern computing.
So … ahem … get on your smart phone or computer right now and visit bollardhead.substack.com for the liner notes, links to past Bollard reviews and features, and a link to this playlist, or search for it by name (All Roads Trip 2024) on that evil app that’s surely tracking your progress up the coast as you listen and selling that data on the sly. Then roll the windows down, turn it the fuck up, and explore more of our state’s amazing sights and sounds.
