Mainers should take note that they have three opportunities this weekend to see the talented and charming Adam Nordell and Johanna Davis, partners and farmers of Songbird Farm in Unity, ME. To celebrate the release of Adam's most recent album, Maine Farmland Trust is hosting a mini concert series:  Deering Grange in Portland on August 25; The Hub in Unity on August 26; and Halcyon Grange in Blue Hill on August 27.

Nordell and Davis are small grain and mixed vegetables farmers by day and summer and traveling musicians by night and winter. They bring a banjo, guitar, and a fiddle to the stage with boot-stomping energy to dances, concerts, and workshops around New England. The latest CD is something of a musical meditation on agrarian life, and I'll bet you 10 ears of fresh-picked sweet corn that Nordell's description will resonate with all you small-scale veggie farmers out there:
“You might think of this as a slow-song movement: I'll get the seed of a song while I'm doing field work, maybe cultivating beets. Something like ''The red dirt shows in the space between the rows.  That grass will grow back, we'll be back at it with our hoes.” I'll get stuck on those two lines for a long time.  But then I'll be hoeing an identical row of beets two years later, and out of nowhere, that lyric will come rushing back, followed by the rest of the song.    It will have accumulated all of these  images from the farm  and our travels, and maybe – hopefully - it will have something broader to say.”
Listen to some of their music, here!