John R. Miller, Amy Speace, Floyd Mercantile, and more on Mountain Stage

GUEST ARTISTS: John R. Miller, Amy Speace, Floyd Mercantile feat. Peter Mulvey & Jenna Nicholls, and more artists TBA (click each artist name to learn more)

All tickets to this show are e-tickets and will be emailed to you upon purchase. Open up the pdf and the QR code on your ticket will be scanned at the door. This event will also be offered as a livestream.

Mountain Stage livestreams are free, however, there are some incredible folks out there who’d like to show their support through a donation-based, pay-what-you-want “ticket” for the livestream. This is a donation-based “ticket” to show some love for the program and is not a ticket to the live event.

You’ll be able to catch the show from the comfort of your home (or wherever you wish) Sunday, June 7, 2026 – at 7 PM ET at mountainstage.org.

Click here to learn more about Mountain Stage and the live show experience!

• Doors to the lobby open at 5pm
• Doors to the theater open at 6:30pm
• Show starts at 7pm

John R. Miller is a true hyphenate artist: singer-songwriter-picker. Born in the Washington, DC area and raised in West Virginia, Miller has built a reputation as a thoughtful, boundary-pushing voice in alt-country and Americana, drawing from punk, traditional Appalachian music, and less conventional rock influences. Every song on his thrilling debut solo album, Depreciated, is lush with intricate wordplay and haunting imagery, backed by a band that is on fire. One of his biggest long-time fans is roots music favorite Tyler Childers, who says he’s “a well- travelled wordsmith mapping out the world he’s seen, three chords at a time. ” Miller is somehow able to transport us to a shadowy honkytonk and get existential all in the same line with his tightly written compositions.

Peter Mulvey has been a songwriter, road-dog, raconteur and almost-poet since before he can remember. Raised working-class Catholic on the Northwest side of Milwaukee, he took a semester in Ireland, and immediately began cutting classes to busk on Grafton Street in Dublin and hitchhike through the country, finding whatever gigs he could. Back stateside, he spent a couple years gigging in the Midwest before lighting out for Boston, where he returned to busking (this time in the subway) and coffeehouses. Small shows led to larger shows, which eventually led to regional and then national and international touring. The wheels have not stopped since.

Nineteen records, an illustrated book, thousands of live performances, a TEDx talk, a decades-long association with the National Youth Science Camp, opening for luminaries such as Ani DiFranco, Emmylou Harris, and Chuck Prophet, appearances on NPR, an annual autumn tour by bicycle, emceeing festivals, hosting his own boutique festival (the Lamplighter Sessions, in Boston and Wisconsin)… Mulvey never stops. He has built his life’s work on collaboration and an instinct for the eclectic and the vital. He folds everything he encounters into his work: poetry, social justice, scientific literacy, & a deeply abiding humanism are all on plain display in his art.

In late January 2019, Mulvey and his band, SistaStrings (Chauntee & Monique Ross) with Nathan Kilen on drums, decamped to their home turf, the Cafe Carpe, in Fort Atkinson, WI where they spent just five days making two records in the tiny back room. The live record, “Peter Mulvey with SistaStrings Live at the Cafe Carpe” is out now on Righteous Babe Records. It’s a celebration of a world that is temporarily on hold: a small folk club, packed with listeners, and a band shoulder-to-shoulder, playing and singing with intimacy and abandon.

______

Hailing from the small town of Irwin, PA near Pittsburgh, after college Jenna Nicholls set her sights east to test her wings as a songwriter and performer. Initially trying Boston, she ultimately gravitated to the creative hotbed of Manhattan’s Lower East Side forging lasting friendships with other like-minded artists and musicians. Nicholls made three albums on her own dime: Curled Up Toes in Red Mary Janes, The Blooming Hour, and Radio Parade. The albums revealed a restless muse and a theme that would be a constant for Nicholls: a love of vintage music – anything from classic music films like “Singin’ in the Rain” to Bessie Smith.

The Commuter displays Jenna’s melodic and lyrical gifts in full flower. It’s a cinematic trip that takes the listener to 1930’s Parisian cafés, New Orleans juke joints, Tennessee hills and the wide-open vistas of Texas and Oklahoma; even the weekly commute from Manhattan to the Hudson Valley home Jenna created with her husband makes an appearance. “Strung together with a thread of the American experience, this album reflects the great vintage recordings that I hold so dear. With that in mind, I can think of no better person to have worked with on this project than Larry Campbell. Watching Larry’s genius come to life, the fluidity and grace in which he works was a privilege I’ll never forget. The recording, engineering, and performances by the many talented players on this record are astonishing. I’m blessed beyond measure to have been included in their company.”

A fascination with offbeat themes shows up in “You, Me and the Moon” and “No Boots,” both featuring cowboys: “I’d been commissioned to write a musical about Will James, a cowboy/actor/painter who lived in the 1930’s” says Nicholls. “For a variety of reasons, said show never happened. But “You, Me and the Moon” and “No Boots” remain alive and well.”

“Small Talk,” with its swaggering horn driven arrangement, combines Jenna’s present-day outlook with her love of vintage music: “This story began as a response to a Randy Newman song called “Last Night I Had a Dream.” I’d been listening to it on the train one evening on my way home from work in NYC. The first line is “Last night I had a dream, and you were in it” – The curmudgeon in me thought to myself “Thank God because if I wasn’t in it, I’d have zero desire to hear your dream story”. The first line of “Small Talk” is “I don’t care about your dream last night, if I ain’t in it, don’t wanna’ hear It” – and the rest is history.” These and other tunes from Jenna’s repertoire form the backbone of her adventurous and charming live performances. Whether delivered via ukulele, guitar, keyboard, with the occasional whistling or mouth-trumpet solos, Jenna’s songs connect, anchored by her wit and vocal virtuosity.

Heralded by Rolling Stone, Billboard Magazine and The New York Times and featured on NPR’s “Weekend Edition”, Amy Speace is one of the leading voices of contemporary Folk and Americana songwriters. She was discovered 2005 by Judy Collins, who signed her to her record label and has recorded her songs. Amy is the 2020 winner of the AMA UK’s International Song of the Year. Her 2025 10th release, a spare, solo acoustic album recorded in three hours, “The Blue Rock Session,” recorded at Blue Rock Studio in Wimberley, TX during a writer’s retreat, is gaining the best critical raves of her career. “The American Dream,” was released in 2024 and became the #1 record and the title track was named #1 song in the FAI Radio Charts for its first month out.  A “writer’s writer,” Amy’s debut collection of poetry, The Cardinals, will be published by Red Hen Press in September 2026. Her writing has been published by The New York Times, American Songwriter, Salon.com, The Guardian, No Depression, Working Mother, 2 River View and Eunonia. In 2025, she published To The Performer: A Singer-Songwriter’s Handbook, based on her 20 years of teaching performance.  In addition to her performance career, she teaches English and Writing at Cumberland University in Lebanon, TN.

In a dim green room backstage on tour in the UK, Michaela Anne pressed record on her phone and captured what would become the chorus to her new single, If Your Body Fails You — her first song in two years. It was the spark that broke a long silence, a stretch when songwriting had felt impossibly far away.

The silence began when Michaela became a mom, just as her own mother suffered a life-altering stroke. Bearing witness to her mother’s loss—of mobility, of independence, of being treated as fully herself—Michaela became desperate to understand unconditional love, for herself and for those around her. “I want to resist the idea that we must be preserved. If we’re lucky to be here long enough, our bodies will fail us, and only in our deep devotion to ourselves and each other will we survive.” If Your Body Fails You carries that tenderness: a recognition that we will change, and that love must deepen to hold all of it.

Her forthcoming album, These Are The Days, is the first music of her career that she fully owns. No longer willing to be part of a system that denied her ownership of her work, Michaela recorded the album at her home studio — a backyard sanctuary hand-built by her husband, producer Aaron Shafer Haiss, and his father. It marks her debut release on her own label, Georgia June Records.

Born into a military family that moved frequently, Michaela Anne first drew national attention with her 2014 debut Ease My Mind, praised by The New York Times for its “plain-spoken songs of romantic regret and small-town longing.” After a move from Brooklyn to Nashville, she followed with 2016’s Bright Lights and the Fame, earning comparisons in Rolling Stone to Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris.

Her 2019 Yep Roc debut Desert Dove marked a true breakthrough. Praised by outlets from Billboard and USA Today to NPR, which called its lead single “one of those moody, breathtaking, stop-you-in-your-tracks songs,” the album landed her on major festival stages from Bonnaroo to XPoNential.

Upon tallying how many decades he’s worked as a professional guitar slinger, Telecaster master Bill Kirchen quips, “Well, they don't make 50 years like they used to.” They don’t often make careers like his, either.
From performing with his Who Knows Pickers jug band in Ann Arbor High School’s senior talent show (also on the program: the future Iggy Pop), to birthing the Americana genre with the original “hippie country band,” Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen, this affable Austinite has been everywhere, man, flying alongside some of the planet’s coolest cats — including the Jesus of Cool, Nick Lowe, and Lowe’s old protégé, Elvis Costello.
Kirchen has toured the world with Lowe, who produced an album by Kirchen’s post-Airmen band, the Moonlighters, and Costello recruited Kirchen for high-profile gigs like the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival — and even named his festival band after Kirchen’s Hammer of the Honky-Tonk Gods album. Lowe appears on that 2006 album, and its 2010 follow-up, Word to the Wise, along with Costello, Maria Muldaur, Dan Hicks and other luminaries.
Now those albums, plus Kirchen’s third Proper Records release, 2013’s Seeds and Stems, are being combined with three bonus tracks from Transatlantica, his 2016 project with pub-rock progenitor Austin de Lone, as a two-CD retrospective titled The Proper Years. Waxworks, is a vinyl best-of version of the full collection.
A well-balanced mix of engaging originals and wonderfully rendered covers, The Proper Years admirably conveys Kirchen’s versatility as a player and singer — one of the first to mash up rockabilly, country, western swing, honky-tonk, jump blues, jazz, boogie-woogie and even the “psychedelic folk rock” he played with the Seventh Seal, the band he formed while attending the University of Michigan. (MC5 manager/activist John Sinclair got them a dealon the ESP-Disk label, home of Sun Ra, but the band turned it down.)
Somewhere between steering Commander Cody’s “Hot Rod Lincoln” into a top-10 hit and scoring a Grammy nomination for Best Country Instrumental Performance, Kirchen dubbed his sound “dieselbilly,” wrapping his fondness for country’s truck-driving song subgenre (as in big rigs, not pickups), its intersection with the Bakersfield Sound and his own name into one memorable moniker.
Kirchen’s right-place-at-the-right-time career has put him at the forefront of many musical movements, including outlaw country; Commander Cody’s 1974 album, Live from Deep in the Heart of Texas, recorded at Austin’s legendary Armadillo World Headquarters, made Rolling Stone’s 100 Best Albums of All Time list.
But whatever label Kirchen’s music wears, it’s always notable for its balance of high-octane energy and deft understatement. There’s no leadfoot excess; Kirchen’s all about finesse — a sensibility absorbed from the symphonies and Broadway musicals his parents loved, along with the orchestral works he played as a school-band trombonist. Through another major influence, Interlochen Center for the Arts summer camp counselor David Siglin (who would go on to run famed Ann Arbor venue the Ark), Kirchen became immersed in folk traditions and learned to love the “big, sonorous tones” of an undistorted guitar. “I was more interested in sounding like Doc Watson than Eric Clapton,” admits Kirchen, whose main guitar was crafted by Rick Kelly of Carmine Street Guitars from 200-year-old pine floorboards recycled from film director Jim Jarmusch’s loft.
It’s fitting that this collection begins with his ode to that Telly-modeled “stick of wood” he calls “the bicycle of the electric guitar —the most efficient way to get from point A to point B.” That song also serves as exhibit A in a collection showcasing a central facet of Kirchen’s songwriting: his wit. If there’s a laugh to be reached for — or stooped to —Kirchen’s goin’ for it; you don’t survive years in a band named Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen, or drop album titles like Seeds and Stems, without possessing a gleefully subversive, double-entendre-loving funny bone. “I like music where at least someone onstage is smiling sometimes, fer crissake,” jokes Kirchen, who’s often grinning happily when he’s not busy singing.
But for every injection of humor, there’s an equal dose of heart (and in some cases, heartbreak). And songs like “Tell Me the Reason” or “Get a Little Goner” illustrate another truism: Kirchen often sets the saddest or mostbiting lyrics to the jauntiest melodies. Those two were cowritten by his wife, Louise; “Goner” also features frequent contributor Sarah Brown (coincidentally also raised in Ann Arbor).
Kirchen likes collaborating; on Word to the Wise, a musical reminiscence of sorts, he tapped several favorite artists to join him, carefully selecting or writing songs for each. In the liner notes, he explains, “The criteria we used were that you had to be A) someone I had actually played with, either on stage or record, and B) not dead yet.” Sadly, Norton Buffalo, who played harmonica with the Airmen and Moonlighters, passed away shortly after recording “Valley of the Moon” — in which Kirchen revisits scenes of his early life with Louise on a trip to attend a funeral (for Hacienda Brother Chris Gaffney, another musical mate). Dan Hicks, who delivered a note-perfect duet on the title tune — written for him —died in 2016. But as of this writing, Lowe, Costello, Maria Muldaur, Paul Carrack, original Asleep at the Wheel vocalist Chris O’Connell and Commander Cody (aka George Frayne) are still very much with us.
Kirchen’s entertaining liner notes explain his connection to each, tracing many of these relationships directly to longtime collaborator and “mainman” Austin de Lone, who appears on all three solo albums and shares billing on Transatlanticana. Philadelphia-born keyboardist de Lone and his band, Eggs Over Easy, moved to England in 1970, urged by Jimi Hendrix’s manager, Chas Chandler. Their rootsy mix of blues, country and rock caught on — and germinated the pub rock movement, whose acolytes included Brinsley Schwarz, in which Lowe played bass. In 1972, de Lone moved to California, where he met Kirchen. Years later, de Lone wound up joining the Moonlighters and introducing Kirchen to Lowe, who produced the band’s 1983 album, Rush Hour (and introduced Kirchen to Costello). That album was engineered by Paul Riley, who eventually would produce all four of Kirchen’s Proper Records albums.
A devoted Anglophile, thanks to two aunts who married Brits, Kirchen began recording for the label after owner Malcolm Mills promised, “I'm going to give you the best deal you've had in 25 years.” He did, too. Mills not only supports Kirchen’s recorded output, he also supports the guitarist on stage, right alongside bassist Riley. “Where else do you get a record company where the owner plays drums, the producer plays bass, and they tour with you?” Kirchen says of his good friends. “They’re the best.”
That’s just another twist in an incredible career trajectory set in motion, according to Kirchen, by two pivotal events: the 1964 and ’65 Newport Folk Festivals. As a high-school kid on a quest to catch Mississippi John Hurt, he thumbed to the first one, then went back the following year — and witnessed Dylan going electric. “That pretty well blew away the competition for what I was going to do before, or if, or when I grew up,” he says of those experiences.
Five years later, he found himself sharing a bill with John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Stevie Wonder, when Commander Cody and the Airmen, who’d formed in Ann Arbor, played a benefit for Sinclair after he got 10 years for two joints. A mere 50 years later, Kirchen’s still having a blast. He’s even planning another tour with Riley and Mills. But releasing this package, he says, “nicely puts a bow on a whole, very enjoyable period of my life.”
“Not that it's over,” he adds quickly. “I mean, I've got more stuff in the works.”
Then he cracks, “Don’t tell anybody, but it's not as hard as it looks.”

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Mountain Stage