PORT ANGELES — Nathaniel Talbot and Nick Drummond, two young singers seen at the Juan de Fuca Festival of the Arts in recent years, will give a concert Saturday night at Harbinger Winery, 2358 W. U.S. Highway 101, where tickets will be on sale at the door only.
Seattle’s Drummond, whose bands have included Impossible Bird and The Senate, will open the show at 7 p.m. Attendees are welcome to arrive early for a beverage, naturally, and pay the sliding-scale ticket price of $10 to $15. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
Talbot is here to celebrate the forthcoming release of his album “Swamp Rose and Honeysuckle Vine,” a collection of songs grown on a Whidbey Island organic farm.
Tracks such as “Threshing Day,” “River Song” and “When the Wind Is Right,” Talbot writes, come out of the lush fields and wide vistas there.
Talbot grew up in the foothills outside Portland, Ore., surrounded by big trees and the music of Eric Clapton and Paul Simon; he started piano at age 7 and turned to guitar around 13, to later steep himself in Soundgarden, Elliot Smith and Kelly Joe Phelps.
Produced by Talbot along with Rob Stroup at Portland’s Fluff & Gravy Records, “Swamp Rose and Honeysuckle Vine” is a departure from his previous records.
On them there were “a lot of songs of logging, botany, and even soil erosion, photosynthesis and the deep beauty of hiking at night,” he said.
But since he’s gone into farming, Talbot has likewise dug into the basic human nature of storytelling.
These days, he explores “stuff that people used to sing about: stories about farmers wrestling the landscape, loving it, abusing it, old tractors getting stuck in the wetland,” he said.
Still more material grows out of “kids leaving the farm, soil blowing away in the wind, long, hard days of work and the amazing sense of reward and connection with the land.”
To find out more about these two artists, see www.nathanieltalbot.com and www.nickdrummond.com.
