“DO you think fewer people are turning out to see live music at the ‘grass roots’ end ?” asked Andy Atkinson, former Bogus Brother and now leader of the York band Acko Pulco & The Cliff Divers in an email this week.

Fibbers boss Tim Hornsby has posited the same thought too, but a full house turned out there for rising North East talent Sam Fender on Tuesday, and Joe Coates’s York concert promoters Please Please You keep finding ways to please you at The Basement, The Crescent, The Winning Post and beyond.

Wistful country singer and guitarist Dawn Landes, now moved from Brooklyn to Nashville, drew an appreciative gathering to her low-key gig with keyboard-playing husband Creighton Irons, contemplating the “big themes of midlife” in mid-tempo songs of heartbreak, youth fading into the distance, and love lost and found.

York Press:

Dawn Landes: mid-tempo, midlife songs 

From bittersweet beauty to check-shirted Ian Felice, who shed his fellow Felice Brothers, from upstate New York’s Catskill Mountains, to play Americana songs old (Felice Brothers), new (this year’s In The Kingdom Of Dreams solo album) and yet to be recorded (the stand-out The Days Of The Years Of My Life).

Felice was nursing a cold, but all the better for singing songs in the Bob Dylan mode; lyrical, moving, sublimely perceptive, sometimes witty, other times withering. Now that’s why live music makes you feel so alive.