Meadowlark is not just a music festival that happens to take place on a farm. Think of it more like a Farm-to-Soundcheck experience. You can conceivably watch a band, pick some apples, then watch the next band while eating the apples.
“It’s peak apple harvest,” says Elizabeth Ryan of Stone Ridge Orchard, where the festival is taking place. “Our fantasy is that people come and buy bags of apples, and really understand and embrace it’s not just a music festival, it’s partly about supporting my farm, and other farmers.”
Another way the festival supports farmers is that a percentage of ticket sales will be donated to both the Rondout Valley Growers Association and Farm Aid.
“Dan and I are mission-and-vision aligned,” Ryan says of festival producer Daniel Leslie, who’s worked tirelessly not only to book bands, but to help make the festival a sustainable event.
“There is a very positive energy flowing into this thing,” Leslie says. “Ultimately, we want something that can last over time and become part of the community.”
While intimate in its way, Meadowlark isn’t a hoedown, it’s a carefully curated selection of national acts and some regional ones as well.
“We try to mix it up between Americana, roots, and sort of indie music,” says Leslie. “Originally the concept was that one day would be more focused on one genre, and the other day on the other, but we ended up with a really good mix on both days.”
A special preview show at Levon Helm Studios several weeks ago presented the opportunity to take a deep dive into three distinct acts representative of the quality you can expect at this year’s Meadowlark, beginning with Fruit Bats, who headline Saturday evening.
Fruit Bats, if you’re unfamiliar, is the brainchild of Eric D. Johnson, who started the project twenty years ago. Influenced by some of the dreamy, four-track-type artists of the time, Fruit Bats might’ve gone a different direction were it not for an early moment of revelation.
“I was trying to sing like other people,” Johnson admits, “then, I remember singing a Whitney Houston song as a joke, like, really singing out. My friend who was my drummer was like, I know you’re joking, but that’s you, that’s your actual voice.”
As Johnson’s confidence in his own voice grew, so did his abilities as a songwriter and his willingness to experiment with richer production values. Fruit Bats has released ten albums to date, no two quite the same.
Somewhere in the middle of the project’s existence, Johnson took a surprise hiatus and joined The Shins for a while, a band who could easily be on the same Spotify-type playlist.
“It was a good musical influence,” Johnson says. “James [Shins’ singer] is a brilliant writer. It made me a better musician because those songs are like the Beatles, it seems simple, then you dive into it, and you’re like, wow, this is incredibly complicated and very brilliant.”
Johnson’s other projects didn’t stop there. In the process of scoring indie films, he improved his Pro Tools skills to the point that he’s been able to do much of the production for his own records.
“The demo-ing and the album-making have become kind of one animal,” he says, “the studio is the writing tool.”
Despite being a Chicagoan who lives in Los Angeles, Johnson actually spends quite a lot of time in our area with his other band, Bonny Light Horseman, who live and record right here in Kingston. This makes Eric D. Johnson at least a part-time honorary Kingstonian—score one for Kingston!
On the roots music side of Meadowlark’s line-up, we find bluesman Ryan Lee Crosby, an insider favorite who’s played the festival each year of its existence.
In an age of imitation and appropriation, Ryan Lee Crosby is proof that it’s still possible to play earnestly within a living tradition, partly because the man does his homework, and partly because he’s just so damn good.
“For me, everything kind of begins and ends with the Blue Front Cafe in Bentonia, Mississippi,” Crosby says, “which is a juke joint owned by Jimmy ‘Duck’ Holmes. I think of him as my primary teacher. A lot of what I play, I wouldn’t say all of it, is very much informed by the time I’ve spent there.”
Unlike going on YouTube to figure out how to change the wiper blades on your Toyota, the Delta blues in particular is one of those things best transmitted in person. Crosby has been sitting knee-to-knee with Holmes several times a year for about five years now. You can hear it in his guitar. But the lineage goes beyond Holmes.
“The Bentonia blues was said to be created by a man named Henry Stuckey who was never recorded, but he’s considered to be the originator of the style,” Crosby explains. “Skip James was around at that time too. Skip was the first musician from the region to be recorded in 1931. Jimmy learned from him, and Jack Owens, but Jimmy does his own thing too.”
There’s a lot of mythology when it comes to Delta blues, stories about Robert Johnson meeting the devil at a crossroads, trading his soul for his legendary guitar-playing ability and that sort of thing. Crosby has his own positive and unique take on what the blues mean to him:
“When I think about the arc of my life, where it’s been and where I hope it goes, I imagine it as a trajectory of darkness into light. To me, my love of the blues is part of a path that has to do with cultivating compassion.”
Born and raised in the Northeast where he lives to this day, Crosby nonetheless feels an ongoing connection with the tradition.
“I enjoy thinking about how many of the musicians that I love, when they left Mississippi, they went to places where I’ve spent time. But I also feel like I try to carry an emotional resonance with Bentonia wherever I go.”
One act at this year’s Meadowlark that finds inspiration in a truly wide-ranging variety of genres is Lulu Lewis.
Firstly, to clarify, Lulu Lewis is not the name of a single singer-songwriter, but an experimental duo comprised of Dylan Hundley and Pablo Martin. This is not to say Lulu Lewis was not a real person.
“We found her name on a stone at the Trinity Church graveyard in Harlem,” Dylan Hundley explains. “Pablo and I were out walking on a sunny, summer day. We walked into this cemetery, which is beautiful, we looked down and saw Lulu Lewis. She was on her own, and we both had the same thought, like, that’s a great name for a band.”
Research into the historic Lulu Lewis has yet to turn up any leads. Lulu Lewis the band, as mentioned, is equally hard to pin down.
The video for their song “Destroy All Data” will make you think they’re channeling Kraftwerk. Their next two videos are vintage New York punk from the 1970s. The variety may seem perplexing at first, but it’s intentional.
“Anything that is gonna come out from my brain right now, at this point in 2024, it’s probably been done before,” says Pablo Martin, a native of Buenos Aires who initially came to New York to work as a music engineer. “I cannot even attach myself to a particular thing, but I could conceptually, you know what I mean?”
Martin goes on to explain how he becomes inspired by experimenting with genres he isn’t entirely familiar with.
“When I don’t know something well, it becomes its own thing,” he explains.
Dylan Hundley’s singing style, meanwhile, has all the engaging earmarks of performance art. With a background in film, she also shoots and directs most of Lulu Lewis’ videos.
If you’re looking for something that provides both a commentary and synthesis of today’s rag-tag musical environment, Lulu Lewis is a good band to check out at Meadowlark.
In addition to the outdoor stage, this year Meadowlark is adding a more intimate performance space in the farm’s cider bar, so there are literally twice as many acts playing as last year.
Stone Ridge Orchard is known for their award-winning hard ciders which will be available. There will be plenty of artisanal food trucks, a farmers’ market featuring other growers, a variety of local craftspeople, vendors and, of course, the bucolic setting, which brings it all together. For information about the complete line-up, schedule, tickets, parking and the like, see meadowlarkfest.org
Join the family! 
