Milan McAlevey is an American songwriter, guitarist and singer. A long-time resident of the state of Maine, his songs are often informed by the dreamy melancholy of the New England coast. They center on storytelling through lyrics that convey a wryly existentialist worldview and share an affinity with magical realism via hobo poetry and tall tales from last century America. Milan’s life and music are an archetypal story of a lost songwriter, one finally getting his due after decades outside the limelight. After all, Milan has been writing songs for 30 years and yet hadn’t had his first commercial release under his own name until 2022’s Islands of Milans. Now almost two years later his new album Bucksport Motel will arrive May 10th on Fortune Tellers, a label founded by Peter Bauer of the Walkmen.
Growing up in the woods of New Hampshire, Milan McAlevey was exposed to a wide range of musical influences. His father, a furniture maker, was a bluegrass superfan and best friend of Eric Von Schmidt, painter, folk musician and mentor of young Bob Dylan. While the likes of Eric Von Schmidt and Maria Muldaur were familiar faces in his father’s home, his mother, a midwife, was a Deadhead who took young Milan on her adventures. So, while he got to see a dozen Grateful Dead shows, he also got to tag along with his father to the Sanders Theater in Cambridge to see the likes of Bill Monroe, Tony Rice, and Doc Watson. These formative experiences coincided with him starting guitar lessons, and by high school he was regularly playing dances and parties with his high school friends.
He moved to New York to attend Sarah Lawrence College to study music and writing, but dropped out during his senior year, working as an art handler to support his musical aspirations. During this period, he lived in fin de siècle Brooklyn and served as both leader and sideman in several weird bands, never with much success.
In 2004 McAlevey relocated to mid-coast Maine seeking a quieter quality of life. Songwriting continued to be his primary focus though there was no commercial output and few live performances. Admiral of the State of Maine, recorded in 2008 and produced by Walter Martin (also of the Walkmen and thus the Fortune Tellers connection), was immediately shelved and heard by very few people until being released fifteen years later by Fortune Tellers in 2022. In 2010 he founded the band Coke Weed in Bar Harbor, ME with his then-girlfriend Nina Donghia. As songwriter and bandleader, he’d go on to produce four Coke Weed albums. The band’s third LP, 2013’s Back To Soft, was an unlikely and minor college radio hit. In 2022 he released Islands of Milans, a deeply personal collection reflecting on friendship, recovery and aging, of which Under the Radar wrote, “McAlevey’s desolate lyricism and search for beauty in pain mirrors fellow singer/songwriter touchstones like David Berman, conjuring a similar sense of fragile soul-searching yearning.”
On new album Bucksport Motel Milan McAlevey expands his unique and subtle songwriting through forms indebted to the outlaw country movement of the 1970s and its divergent branches, including the works of prime-period Waylon Jennings, Tompall Glaser, and J.J. Cale, as well as the Rolling Stones in their honky-tonk period, a perennial touchstone for McAlevey. While growing up in an environment where roots music was de rigueur, it wasn’t until a pandemic reacquaintance with Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks that he was compelled to concentrate on certain conventions of groove and storytelling prominent in American roots recordings. Inspired by Eno’s use of country music to evoke a zero-gravity atmosphere, McAlevey picked up an old Magnatone lap steel guitar and began to explore these tropes to create a framework on which he crafts lyrics that look back in bewilderment at his dissolute youth, trying to parse the details from the vantage point of a middle-aged survivor.
Likewise, the trainyard gospels of Jerry Jeff Walker and Jimmie Rodgers proved a lodestar for McAlevey during the writing of the album. Indeed, the latter’s presentation of his spiritual transience and constant yearning lights the way for McAlevey as he pays tribute to lost lovers, reckons with the vagaries of life, and contemplates the chaos of an extended and booze-soaked adolescence. The songs of Bucksport Motel often seem to be on the verge of imparting some kernels of hard-won wisdom before they veer off like shaggy dog stories shot through with low-key stoner humor. McAlevey has stated that Bucksport Motel describes not so much a location as a metaphysical plane where a life of “bleary-eyed chaos” and questionable decisions is revealed to be “the handiwork of a great spirit”.
Bucksport Motel features the voice and guitar work of McAlevey along with contributions from long-time collaborator and multi-instrumentalist Walter Martin (the Walkmen). Other guest musicians include Eric Gagne (Footings) and Nina Donghia (Coke Weed).
High Tea, the indie folk-rock duo hailing from Massachusetts, is a concoction of sweepingly soulful harmonies, guitar riffs to knock your socks off, and a refreshing blend of old blues and new rock. Isabella DeHerdt and Isaac Eliot have come together to fill spaces with homegrown storytelling and Lumineers-esque vocals. Their songs are ripe with americana heartbreak, and tell tales of growing up, going wild, and always coming back to the ones you love.
Their previous releases, Old Cowboy and The Wick And The Flame were featured on playlists, radio shows, and publications like The Boston Globe, The Greenfield Recorder (among others). The title track of Old Cowboy led them to be chosen as one of WBUR’s top 4 Massachusetts Tiny Desk entries of 2022. They toured The Wick And The Flame on the West Coast, in New England, and throughout other US States and received write ups from Atwood’s Magazine, The Boston Herald, and more.
Their new EP, Scuba Diving, dives - literally and figuratively - into four very different worlds on each unique song. Listeners are led through an exhilarating and dangerous love story, a struggle for independence from a lineage of harsh repression, and an internal struggle against the feeling of hopelessness brought on by quick-fix culture, all accompanied by dynamic guitar, thumping drums, and echoing harmonies. This journey of lyrical storytelling and compelling sound culminates in the title track and single from the album, a personal and intimate story of hospitalization, a search for mental health, fear for a friend who is facing down demons, and the fight for understanding an ally’s role within that story. Without a doubt, Scuba Diving is some of High Tea’s most honest and eye-opening work yet.
Doors are at 7pm and music will start at 8pm sharp. Seating is first come first served.