Mountain Stage | March 27, 2022

Multiple Grammy Award-winning artist, songwriter and musician Janis Ian is celebrating a lifetime in music. Having written some of pop music’s most evergreen songs — “Society’s Child,” “At Seventeen,” “Jesse,” and “Stars,” among them — Ian is embracing a new milestone: the art of the farewell. Set for release on January 21, 2022 on her own Rude Girl Records, "The Light at the End of the Line" is Ian’s latest and last solo studio album to bookend a kaleidoscopic catalog that began with her 1967 self-titled debut.

Afro/Indigenous/Colombian/Canadian/punk/folklorist/traditionalist/transgressive/diva/angel. There are so many layers to Canadian-Colombian singer Lido Pimienta’s identity that you might get lost in them. But if you did, you’d be missing the point. Her multi-textural, mind-bending voice and music project what Canada’s "The Globe and Mail" called her “bold, brash, polarizing” persona, which constantly confronts the powers that be. But it also reveals an embrace of the Afro- and Indigenous traditions that is at once defiant, delicate and sweetly nostalgic.

Beppe Gambetta is a guitarist, vocalist, researcher and composer born in Genova, Italy in 1955, who developed a style of concert presentation that brings American and European roots to speak together with one voice. In his unique approach, Gambetta blends energetic grooves with passionate melodies, giving new life to sources from different times, periods and places. In addition, the original music he composes gives contemporary influences to traditional roots music.

Philip B. Price is best known as the lead singer and songwriter behind the New England-based melancholic folk/pop band Winterpills, but his resumé stretches back into the late '80s and draws on minimalist/jagged art-rock, bedroom lo-fi pop, power pop, '70s singer-songwriter and Brit folk. His spare, riveting live shows, with his quavering tenor, spidery guitar work and dense wordplay, manage to make intimacy feel massively anthemic, and grinding rock seem like a close-whispered romantic inside joke.

Chris Haddox is a West Virginia born (Logan) and based (Morgantown) musician who’s never met a stringed instrument he couldn’t master. He writes and sings his voluminous collection of songs about — in his own words — “religion, firearms, courthouse squares, goats on trampolines, shoes, fiddles, and hurricanes,” whatever catches his eye. He is also a community leader who has directed Habitat for Humanity and worked to preserve old neighborhoods, a WVU professor of sustainable design, and an amateur musicologist who researches musicians from the southern coalfields of West Virginia.