MUSIC

Rudyard's presents Melissa Ferrick * Vandaveer.

Melissa Ferrick (pictured) has a great deal to show for two decades in the music industry. There is the expansive body of work, mapped out over the sixteen albums that comprise her career to date, nearly all of which she distributed herself. There are the stories of the crisscrossed world and the things she has both gained and lost in her wake. There is the fervent fan-base that has grown with Ferrick, which has waited patiently for her latest opus for the preceding three years. Above all there is the sound, a voice burnished by breakdowns and breakthroughs, refined over the twenty years she has been doing this.

http://www.melissaferrick.com/

Vandaveer (Washington, DC) - VANDAVEER is the song-singing, record-making, globetrotting project penned and put forth by alt-folk tunesmith Mark Charles Heidinger. Born in Ohio, raised in Kentucky, and currently camped out in the nation’s capital, Vandaveer offers up melodic Americana that is both haunting and easy, forlorn and welcoming, with stories as universal as the songs they inhabit. Vandaveer shapeshifts from studio to stage and back with a revolving cast of characters, most prominent among them Rose Guerin, offering up the loveliest harmonies heard this side of Eden.

What started as a solo side project for Heidinger in 2007 blossomed into something more dimensional a year later, with Guerin adding new depth and color to Vandaveer’s sound. The two were integral members of DC’s Federal Reserve collective, a ramshackle group of folk and not-so-folk types alike curating monthly musical happenings throughout the DC area. Informal collaborations in that environment soon galvanized, with Guerin’s voice becoming a reliable fixture in Vandaveer. The band has toured regularly on both sides of the Atlantic since, playing nearly 500 shows, steadily building a diverse fan base from the ground up.

http://www.vandaveer.net/