We're so pleased to have The Milkhouse Heaters and Phil Henry in the room coming up on Sunday, July 19, in a 7:00 PM co-headline performance.
It's our only show in July.
This summer we're running a short series of Local Curator shows, turning over the room to local heroes and letting them call the shots. This one is Jan and Mike Sheehy’s, who are perhaps better known as The Milkhouse Heaters, who live and breathe right down the road from Stage 33 Live.
A brief word from our heart: Stage 33 Live wouldn't exist without Jan & Mike — they supported this thing in word and deed from day one, starting more than a year before we ever hosted a show, and they've never stopped. Pulled us back from the brink of despair more than once when we hit a wall. We like Jan and Mike a whole lot.
The Milkhouse Heaters are refugees of the Boston music scene, where they were nominated for a Boston Music Award and shared the stage with The Black Crowes, Corey Glover, Fuel, Feeder, and Hum. Their songs are on compilations alongside the likes of G. Love and Special Sauce, Jack Johnson, Burning Spear, and The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Their music has been licensed to television shows on ABC, VH1, MTV, ESPN, and ESPN 2. They moved to southern Vermont in 2007, rolled Americana into their punk roots, and became The Milkhouse Heaters. They’re beloved not just for their strong writing and performing chops — they’re also ardent supporters of local music and activists-by-example for considered, considerate living.
Phil Henry is a singer-songwriter steeped in folk tradition, but not bound by it, penning relatable tunes about both everyday and extraordinary life, building detailed worlds and characters with vivid imagery, upbeat rhythm, and strong melodic sensibility. He’s earned contest wins at SolarFest and Susquehanna Music and Arts, and showcase and main stage slots at Falcon Ridge, was showcased at Kerrville and the NorthEast Regional Folk Alliance, and has played celebrated venues like Club Passim and Caffe Lena. No carbon-copy of popular songs or folk radio, his art is an expression of individuality and craftsmanship.
The Milkhouse Heaters and Phil Henry at Stage 33 Live on Sunday, July 19, 2026, in a 7:00 PM co-headline performance. Tickets are $15 in advance through stage33live.com, or $20 at the door as available. Advance tickets guarantee entry. Only 40 tickets will be sold. Advance sales will close at midnight the day before the show, or when 40 tickets are sold. 100% of the ticket money goes to the performers.
At the recent show with Carl Goulet and Sandiland & Vincent, one of the three of our extra-fawncy 4K cameras kept shutting itself off after a few seconds.
With showtime bearing down, we tried reseating all the connections, changing the power source, everything we could think of... nothing helped. We can't afford to be replacing $1,100 gear!
Gave it some bench-testing love yesterday, and it worked just fine. A mystery. One of those things, apparently. There is much relief, so much relief.
A good stretch back we dipped our curious, smartass toes into AI a time or two, but otherwise have pretty much avoided it.
For some reason the other day though, we got a hankering and told Gemini to write us a four-paragraph dramedy about seeing a folk music performance at Stage 33 Live. (Apologies to those of you who are righteously offended, we don't disagree that AI is a lot more evil than not. But it didn't stop us.) It got some stuff wrong — mostly about the chairs, which mostly aren't mismatched, and the few that are folders are nicely padded. But got a lot of it surprisingly right.
We're not sure what it meant by the smell of electronic hum.
This is what it wrote:
The text message said "wear layers," which is Vermont code for the venue is either a meat locker or a kiln, and we won’t know until we get there. Slipping into Stage 33 Live in Bellows Falls, it turns out to be neither. It’s an unassuming, oddly charming television studio-slash-listening room where the air smells faintly of old wood, electronic hum, and the collective anticipation of forty people sitting on mismatched chairs. My friend Clara had dragged me here with the promise of "transformative acoustic vibes," though my skepticism was riding high. I love local music, but I also love cushions with actual lumbar support, and the folding chair I claimed was currently waging war on my lower back.
Then the performer stepped up to the microphone, a rugged troubadour carrying a guitar that looked like it had survived a couple of bear attacks. He tuned up, cleared his throat, and launched into a song about a tractor. Not a metaphor for heartbreak or a poetic allegory about the passage of time—just a genuinely sad, beautifully written ballad about a 1974 John Deere that wouldn't start in October. I braced myself to stifling a laugh, but by the second chorus, the absolute sincerity in his gravelly voice bypassed my irony filters entirely. I glanced over at Clara; she already had a single, devastatingly poignant tear rolling down her cheek. I didn't know whether to hand her a tissue or look up tractor parts on eBay.
The humor of the room was infectious. Between heartbreaking melodies about rural isolation and the harsh beauty of New England winters, the musician cracked dry, deadpan jokes about the local beaver population and the sheer absurdity of trying to make a living playing a wooden box. The intimacy of Stage 33 meant there was nowhere to hide; when he forgot a lyric in the third verse of a sea shanty, a guy in the front row kindly shouted out the missing line about a codfish. The performer didn't skip a beat, thanking him with a tip of his flannel cap, and the entire room erupted into a warm, collective chuckle that felt more like a living room hang than a public concert.
By the time the final chord faded into the studio baffles, the room was dead silent for a lingering, breathless second before the applause broke out. Walking out into the cool Bellows Falls night, the streetlamps casting long shadows over the brick buildings, my back was still stiff but my cynical exterior had completely melted. Clara was quietly humming the tractor song, and honestly, it was stuck in my head too. There’s a strange, beautiful alchemy in places like Stage 33—where you go in expecting a quirky local novelty, and leave feeling like you’ve just been handed a small, precious piece of someone's soul.
Coming up on August 9, the final Local Curator show, this one headed up by Olivia Nied and featuring Star Lane Sox and Scott Hsu.
Olivia is half of Star Lane Sox, a guitar-and-drums indie / punk duo. Influenced by the garage rock revival bands of the early 2000s but giving it their own spin, Star Lane Sox formed after its two founding members met at an open mic. Singer / songwriter / arranger / producer / multi-instrumentalist / performer / session musician Olivia was trained at Goldsmiths London University, the Berklee College of Music jazz program, and the Vermont Jazz Center. She has toured the US, performed at music festivals in the UK, and played clubs in London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Her songs frequently draw from her lived experience as a neurodivergent, transgender young person pursuing radical joy against all odds. And the drummer? An enigma. All we know is that her name is Paige.
Scott Hsu is a second-generation Taiwanese American whose multi-instrumental soul-searching romantic rock / pop blends electronica beats with live looping synthesizers, guitar, and vocal effects. His lyrics are rooted in authenticity, and gravitate toward love, nostalgia, identity, transformation, and redemption. Mandarin-English songs and cross-cultural love expressions reflect a unique identity — global, hybrid, personal, ranging from dreamy Chinglish pop/punk to plucky pop Americana.
Tickets are $20 — all proceeds go to the performers — either in advance through stage33live.com, or at the door as available. Advance tickets guarantee entry. Only 40 tickets will be sold. Advance sales will close at midnight the day before the show, or when 40 tickets are sold.
A hearty Thank You to our seasonal underwriters!
We're entirely run by volunteers from stem to stern, and all donations go toward the costs of keeping the wheels on this thing. We squeeze every penny, and we'd be so happy to squeeze yours.