Natalie Spears Duo

Natalie Spears brings listeners in touch with the warmth of community and the intimate corners of humanity. It’s the quiet awe of wild places that most animates Natalie Spears’ music. Outside her home in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley, she listens to the language of birds, notices patterns of migration and sees the cosmos in the countryside. For Spears, the natural world offers a constant invitation to open the aperture of life to something wider, something wilder. Her forthcoming album, “ Hymn of Wild Things,” (out June 7) chronicles her experience of wonder, loss and metamorphosis. This is a collection of songs about the intimate corners of humanity, hers and ours alike. With a quiver of instruments (banjo, piano, guitar), she threads opposites together: love with loss; tradition with innovation; and the human experience with the more-than-human world.

Spears grew up in a home brimming with music. Her dad would sit at the piano playing Chopin, singing rugby songs, scatting Louis Armstrong ballads and reciting whimsical folk songs from his childhood days in Britain’s East Midlands. Spears started on piano and by fifth grade was lugging an upright bass to school, followed by saxophone and drums. When she moved to Colorado in her early twenties, Spears discovered clawhammer banjo from a co-worker while building straw-bale houses. Old-time Appalachian music is a communal activity, a perfect match for the tight-knit, community spirit of mountain town living. She added banjo to her quiver of instruments and started writing songs.

Spears has played esteemed venues such as the John Hartford Memorial Festival, Ozark Folk Center, Palisade Roots Festival, Chautauqua Community House, Crested Butte Performing Arts Center and the Wheeler Opera House.

Some may know Natalie from her work with long time friend, fiddler Lizzie Plotkin, but for this concert she’ll be accompanied by Carl Meinke on bass.

“Watching Spears on banjo, you can see her lean in, cocking an ear, to suss, to feel, and play. Her banjo is sunlight, gilding the harmony of their voices; her bass, driving the groove deep into the heart of their sound.” - Bonedale Amplified