Enjoy a throwback to our fall tour of the Midwest. Beautiful scenery and lots of car-composing and arranging, as usual! 🙂

We’re so excited for our first time at the Northeast Region Folk Alliance conference in Stamford, CT. We’re honored to have been selected for a Semi-Formal Showcase! Here’s the info on all of our showcase times and places. See you there!

What a wonderful time we spent visiting a part of the US we’d never been to before! We got to play at a magical factory-turned-bookstore in Wisconsin, catch some freak summer weather in Chicago, play at a beautiful theatre in Lansing, MI and collaborate with middle and high school choirs for a series of workshops and a concert in South Haven, MI! Below are some pics of the journey.

We were fortunate to take part in the inaugural Peace First Summit at Florence Gould Hall in NYC this weekend. What a beautiful afternoon of powerful young speakers, passionate challenges to go out of our way to build peace all around us, and inspiring performances! We’re so grateful to the Peace Studio and Dr. Maya Soetoro-Ng for hosting it. Below are some shots of our performance. 

Just wanted to share a little teaser with you all of a video coming soon with the one and only Jean Rohe! She wrote a beautiful song that we had the honor of performing in a paired-down, acoustic arrangement. Stay tuned, and meanwhile, enjoy the ride to the studio!

Our latest video is a submission to NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest 2018. Enjoy “Why Should Your Heart Not Dance?” with a twist, and a tiny table (ahem, desk) on the corner 🙂

We had a wonderful time going all the way to Brooklyn to rehearse and record pianist Kevin Hays’ beautiful tune “Morning”. He wrote the music and the lyrics, and we were so fortunate to get to sing this beauty. Enjoy!

Check out the video of our collaboration with Portuguese beatboxer Rizumik at his NYC apartment. This is the 4th installment of our Sala Connections series, and number 5 is coming soon! Enjoy our rendition of two traditional folk songs from Hungary with a twist. Filmed by Max and Dorian Shire.

Dear friends,

With 2017 almost done flying by, we wanted to leave everyone with something special we’ve been working on. We have so much to be thankful for, and so much to look forward to… we’ve also learned so much with the experience of releasing our first album, and doing it all independently, that we feel a little taste of victory as the year draws to a close.

Of course 2017 has been a year of much change and struggle as well, and we don’t want to just gloss over the hard times as we look back on it. One of the questions we often asked ourselves  this year has been ‘how to stay hopeful in the midst of so much pressure?’

Maybe as a form of therapy for herself, or maybe because the words really cut deep, Anne set to music a very poignant paragraph out of C.S. Lewis’ book “Till We Have Faces”. And maybe because group therapy is a wonderful thing, this song eventually became our album’s title track. Its words let us in on the thoughts of the book’s protagonist as she wavers between reciting to herself the infinite list of real, terrible things that are wrong with her life, and letting go of that list, in order to allow her “heart to dance”.

The video clip below is a labor of love- shot partly in New York and partly in the mountains of Trentino, in the north of Italy. It is an extension of Lewis’ invitation, asking us all whether in the midst of real trouble and sorrow we can choose to find hope and draw strength from the beauty that’s there, mixed in with the brokenness.

The video takes its time unfolding, and we’d love for you to experience it fully. Take five minutes to slow down, pause the multi-tasking and enjoy it (best done with headphones, to hear the badass low-end of the Brazilian Zabumba!). This song has captured some of the feelings we strive to convey whenever we perform, and it is our hope that it brings you some joy as you listen.

Huge thanks to Max Shire and Francesco Moretti for their beautiful camerawork.

Love to all and wishing you an adventurous 2018!

-Asaran Earth Trio