Mirah & Footings at the Chocolate Church Annex

Name: Mirah & Footings at the Chocolate Church Annex
Start: 2025-08-14T19:00:00-04:00
Location: Chocolate Church Arts Center

Schedule

Thu, 14 Aug, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Chocolate Church Arts Center | Bath, ME

MIRAH: Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she works as a songwriter, performer, producer and mom. In a constant dedication to expanding her tender repertoire of American folk songs into a larger context, her recordings seek to find the magical amity between explorative percussion, orchestral sounds and elements of rock and popular music.
Since starting out in the late 1990’s, she has released over a dozen solo and collaborative recordings on various independent labels including K Records, K*ll Rock Stars, Absolute Magnitude Recordings, Double Double Whammy and 7e.p., and toured solo and with countless iterations of her own band in concert halls, music clubs and punk basements all across North America, Japan and Europe.
Mirah has dedicated her creative process to investigating the complicated intersections within communities large and small, believing that with deeper understanding of each other, the seeds of a more generous and less violent world are planted.
“Mirah propels her magical, three-dimensional spaces with her clear beacon of a voice and instrumentation that slips from whisper-in-your-ear intimacy to rushing, tumbling aural avalanches.” -New York Press

FOOTINGS: “How can we move forward when we’re going nowhere?” asks Eric Gagne in the opening lines of The Worm Moon, his fifth full-length as Footings. The album takes its name from the March full moon, which signals the first stirrings of life, kicking off an annual process of rebirth and regeneration that shoots up through the cracks in winter’s desolation to bring growth and hope. The Worm Moon marks the beginnings of a slow process, full of fits and starts and reversals, where it’s not always obvious that conditions are improving. In that way, it’s an apt metaphor for the struggle that shaped the folk rock band’s latest album, out August 1 on Feeding Tube and Don’t Live Like Me Records.
“I’ve always liked the idea of the worm moon,” said Gagne. “It means that even when things seem stagnant, we’re always growing. To me, that’s the only real constant. We should always be reevaluating ourselves and understanding how we're interacting with the world.”
Like its namesake, the album came out of a long, desolate period, where world events like COVID and personal issues like the end of a marriage and the loss of a parent cast a pall over any attempts at creativity. But like a northern New England spring, the songs came anyway and on their own schedule. Gagne recorded the bulk of it with Ben Rogers at Loud Sun Studios in Southern New England. Later, an additional, all-out rocking session with Charlie Chronopoulos at the Glass Factory in Wilton, NH, produced the album’s closing track “I Won’t Go.” Charlie Chronopoulos mixed the album, and Will Killingsworth at Dead Air mastered it.
The songs on the album build lush but sparing textures out of acoustic instruments, primarily guitar, bass and drums, drawing on a slightly configured band, which can range, in live performance, from a solo act to a quartet. As before, Rick Rude’s Jordan Holtz plays bass, and Candace Clement of Western Mass legends Bunny’s a Swine sings and plays guitar and keyboard alongside Gagne. However, there’s a new drummer in Mia Govoni, a Berklee grad with impressive chops. And though long-time Footings violist Elisabeth Fuchsia (Bonnie Prince Billy, Ryan Davis Band) still layers Gagne’s songs with keening, swooning strings on several of Worm Moon’s tracks, she has moved out of the area and is no longer a member of the band.
These bandmates have become an integral part of Gagne’s writing process. “The nice thing about Mia and Jordan and Candace is that I can play them a song and I know that by the time all three of them are done, the song is going to be a million times better,” he says.
Gagne started his musical career in the experimental instrumental band Death to Tyrants in 2003, touring on an alternative circuit of town halls and basements alongside New England hardcore icons like Ampere. Then in 2008, he launched the quieter, folkier Redwing Blackbird with fellow guitarist Austin Wright, playing the same DIY circuit as Death to Tyrants only unplugged; the band recorded three-full length albums between 2010 and 2013 when Wright left the band. Gagne then played briefly with a solo project called Passerine and started Footings with Candace Clement and Elisabeth Fuchsia in 2012.
Since then, Footings has made five albums, toured with Marisa Anderson and played as Bonnie Prince Billy’s back-up band in 2022. Celebrated tastemaker Byron Coley once wrote, “Gagne’s songs and deep vocals, often the core of the band’s operation, combine the literary qualities of a heavy reader with the observational data of a poet.”
Gagne is also a mainstay of the underground music scene in Northern New England, booking a diverse and adventurous bill of artists at Keene, NH-based Nova Arts and curating the excellent Thing in the Spring Festival in Peterborough and Keene for the last 27 years, most recently with Stephen Malkmus and Califone headlining.
- Jennifer Kelly