Charlotte Morris is a Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter weaving Americana, folk, and jazz together with soaring vocals and keen songwriting... she gets compared to Joni Mitchell, Liz Longley, Eva Cassidy, and Ira Wolf. Her live shows are intimate and vulnerable — personal, authentic, and familiar, with laughs and tears. Like having a deep conversation with an old friend. Her influences include artists like Delta Rae, Brandi Carlile, Sara Bareilles, Kelsea Ballerini, Maren Morris, and The Chicks. In 2018 she was part of the Lonesome Traveler folk tour alongside the likes of Peter Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey, George Grove, and more.Charlotte is a veteran of The Bluebird Cafe and The Listening Room (both in Nashville), Rockwood Music Hall (NYC), and festivals including PorchFest (Wayne, PA), Fall for Greenville (South Carolina), and The Ladybug Festival (Wilmington, DE). Her second studio album Wild Child charted internationally, and she spent most of 2024 on the road, including a sold-out show at Uncommon Ground in Chicago and performing as an official showcasing artist at Toronto's 2024 Canadian Music Week. Wild Child was on the Grammy ballot for Best Americana Album, Best Americana Roots Performance (for The Day We Lost You), and Best Music Video (for Love Ain’t Real).Off stage, Charlotte adventures in her converted van with her pup and is an avid crossword puzzler.

Elliott Lee Friesen is a singer/songwriter and wide-ranging multi-disciplinary artist from the green mountains of Vermont. Their acoustic folk-leaning indie-pop alt-rock features soulful vocals and skillful guitar playing, and has gained a following for its heartfelt authenticity, captivating melodies, and introspective lyrics often exploring themes of love, loss, and self-discovery.As a young child with existential dread, Elliot grasped the concept of death and the infinite nature of the cosmos while in the bathtub, and now has SpongeBob tattoos. Charlotte Morris and Elliott Lee Friesen will play the Stage 33 Live listening room at 33 Bridge Street in Bellows Falls, Vermont, on Sunday, February 23 at 6:00 PM. Tickets are $15 in advance through stage33live.com or at the door as available. Advance tickets guarantee entry. As always, only 40 tickets will be sold and the performances will be recorded and filmed. 

The Songbird Soundbath is a deep-relaxation musical meditation immersion that blends live acoustic performance with the soothing tones of singing bowls, chimes, and a metal tongue drum to create an atmosphere of relaxation and inner connection.Led by musician and sound bath facilitator Melissa D, the experience begins with gentle original songs designed to ease participants into a peaceful state. Then, following a guided breathwork and meditation session, the event transitions into a full sound bath where resonant, healing sounds encourage deep rest and rejuvenation.Attendees are encouraged to bring a yoga mat or blanket, and pillows for added comfort — or chairs will also be available for those who prefer to sit.Limited to 15 participants, reservations will be taken on a first-come, first-served basis. Stage 33 Live isn't handling those logistics for this one — to reserve, email [email protected] or call her at 802-342-1046. (Fear not, Melissa is welcoming and kind and smart.)Suggested donation at the door of $20 per person, or more if you feel called... but if cost is a concern, please reach out — no one will be turned away as long as space is available.Please note that this Songbird Soundbath will be recorded and filmed to create a booking reel for retreats, community and yoga centers, and wellness festivals considering hosting a future event. Filming will focus on wide shots capturing the overall experience, and not lingering close-ups. Melissa deeply respects the personal nature of sound baths — some participants may experience unexpected emotions. Privacy and sensitivity will be honored both in the room and in the final documentation.Relax, recharge, and experience the benefits of sound and music in a welcoming, community-centered space on Sunday, March 9 at 3:00 PM.To reserve a spot or for more information, contact Melissa D at [email protected]. 

These are some of the folkiest folks around, wholesome and uplifting and socially conscious. 

This is Mark taking off the Royal We mask, which is hard for me — not comfy making myself the center of attention. But I consider us all friends glued together by Stage 33 Live and I'm letting that notion guide me, whether it's true or not.I've been sitting on this newsletter for a couple days while I try to decide whether or not to include this part. I've decided that I'm going to, even though whenever I do something like this we end up losing a few subscribers ( — people who don't really get what Stage 33 Live is, and why it does what it does the way it does... so the loss doesn't particularly bother me).I haven't discussed any of this with the board or the other volunteers. I guess this might feel like whining, but the intent is to inform.Here's the thing. I don't know how long I can keep doing the live part of Stage 33 Live. In my head I'm 25, but my body keeps reminding me that I'm in my mid-60s and 70 is looming... especially on show days. My knee, my hip, my back, my shoulder. My feet. My bedtime. What happened to me?! I know that to a lot of you I'm still a spry youngster. Well, I'm catching up fast.On show days there are typically just two of us doing tech setup, Evan and me. We start about five hours before showtime to get things ready for soundcheck by 90 minutes before the show... and we're typically the last ones in the building afterward. It's a ten-hour day, minimum. (Could the setup start later and go faster? We could probably shave an hour off by getting rid of the cushion for things to go wrong, which they do, and making it a more stressful time-crunch. Easing in is a choice we've made.) During tech setup, Evan focuses on the audio stuff while I'm doing lights and cameras and miscellaneous things. It's about half physical and half fiddly. It's the physical part that's been weighing on me — going up and down the ladder, moving heavyish stuff around... but mostly it's the weird bending and odd twisting that wreaks havoc.About an hour before showtime, another one or two people normally come in to set up snacks (usually Elaine, sometimes Rana) and help with chairs and a checklist of things to get the room ready (sometimes Rana, sometimes Trevor, sometimes Cathy, occasionally one or two others, sometimes nobody at all).Tearing everything down and stowing it afterward takes a couple-three hours, and we usually have at least three people on hand for at least part of it. Everything that happened before the show happens in reverse, but quicker because there's no dialing-in or show-specific fussiness.When I started this thing, one of my ironclad rules was that I had to be able to do it all myself, putting no expectations on anybody else. And initially, I did do it all solo. But over time there was feature-creep... it got to the point where I couldn't do it all alone even if I wanted to. A couple times in latter days when there's been no help available I've had to do a curtailed, mission-critical-only version of everything, but to do things proper I can't do it without Evan and Elaine and the other rotating cast of lovelies. I appreciate them to no end.Back before Stage 33 Live existed when I was in the depths and throes of volunteering at WOOL-FM, the community radio station in the next room, during a dark stretch of its history with few local hosts, little money, and almost no help with the grunt work of keeping the wheels on, somebody told me that I can't expect people to "help me run my hobby". That irked me a lot, because it's a community radio station — it wasn't and never was my radio station. But the underlying truth of that stinging remark lingers in me for Stage 33 Live. I also consider Stage 33 Live more of a community service than a personal hobby, though I could be wrong. I'm wrong a lot.On the other hand, somebody else once said that if you want things to happen in your community, you have to get involved. That truth also lives in me. I wanted a thing like Stage 33 Live in my community, so I got involved. Trevor, who emceed the Synthfest a couple weeks ago, really nailed the crux of it:

Those two truths that I hold kinda cancel each other out, I guess.The bulk of the Stage 33 Live work doesn't even happen on show days. While there's help on show days, for which I'm so grateful, the non-show-day stuff is all me. I have to admit that it's a lot. It's in-excess-of-full-time volunteer work, and it's just plain nuts that I do it. If I could figure out how to get paid a little something for it without taking away from anybody else's thin slice, I'd wrassle that cash cow right now.Thankfully, I mostly enjoy the non-show-day stuff. Even though it's a giant time-suck, it's low-impact... and not all of it is nose-to-the-grindstone grunt work. A bunch of it gives me a variety of rewarding creative outlets.The non-show-day work includes retrieving the audio and video and backing it up (about a terabyte per show; the cost of storage media is one of our ongoing expenses), then doing the documentation editing — mixing and sweetening and mastering the audio, and syncing it to the video for cutting and color-grading and overlaying, and then distribution.There's also booking and artist liaisoning, writing and making graphics for press and social media and calendars and flyers (and these newsletters) and distributing all of it, maintaining the website and other web presences, setting up ticket sales and compiling the will-call lists, fielding emails and phone calls, doing the bookkeeping, fruitlessly writing grants, paying the bills, trying to stay on top of equipment maintenance (and replacement as needed, and upgrades as possible), doing everything to stay in the good graces of the building owners and tenants (because without their blessing this whole thing ceases to exist), generally keeping tabs on the hundred moving parts and greasing the squeaky ones, and the pile of other persnickety things I'm forgetting to include because they don't happen to be on fire at the moment. When there's "spare" time I've been working on a season of long-form programming for radio, TV, and podcast from the archived clips. This is not a complaint. I'm cool with all this. I wouldn't turn down help, probably, but it's also hard to delegate when so much of it is so inextricably intertwined and requires particular skillsets. It's easiest to just do it myself.No, it's show days that are killing me, and I'm not sure how long I can keep up with that part.The door is always open to volunteers, but honestly, hardly anybody ever steps through that door. Most who do end up not following through, which I totally get. There's endless things I'd like to do and causes I'd like to get involved with, but... there's only so many hours in the day, only so much energy available. Only so much of me. The spirit is willing but the flesh is tapped out. I have no ill will toward anybody who has aspirations that they can't quite get to manifest. I've got so many of those myself.Plus we're in a small and aging community. There's not that many of you, and a lot of you are even older and gimpier than me. And the tech part of show days really requires consistent and reliably dedicated people rather than occasional casual helpers... people who want to be involved start-to-finish, immersed and learning the peccadilloes and ins & outs of our peculiar hybrid live-documentation setup. The small pool gets smaller and smaller.(From the Caffè Lena website: "Every week we need at least thirty volunteers to staff our concerts." GWOT?! This is in addition to their paid staff! They seat 110 versus our 40... but applying that math means if we were them we'd have about ten volunteers per show. They also have a kitchen and bar though, mostly run by volunteers. "You can be a Greeter, Server, Drink-maker, Food Prepper, Dishwasher, or Merchandise Seller." They also have office and professional volunteers. To be fair, they're a bona fide legendary institution founded in 1960 in Saratoga Springs NY — where the median income is more than 60% higher than it is in Bellows Falls. Unexpectedly, though, the median age in Bellows Falls is a year younger than it is in Saratoga Springs.)People with the disposition to get involved with good virtuous fiddliness are already ankle deep in other good virtuous fiddliness... they just don't have the bandwidth to throw in with us. I don't sneeze at anybody who chooses to get busy with any kind of good virtuous fiddliness, because all good virtuous fiddliness is important.I know this bleating isn't going to change anything. And it's not making me feel any better about getting less physically vital. But I also know that for better or worse I'm most of the cogs in this machine, and it seems right that youse-all should be in the know. If I can't do the things that need doing and there's nobody else to do them, Stage 33 Live ends.I'll persevere for as long as I can because I think the work is important and fulfilling... but it's been getting increasingly obvious to me that I'm not gonna last forever.I'm not fishing for attaboys. I'm not reeling in despair. I'm not trying to put anything on anybody. I'm just sayin'.I wanna give my deepest thanks to all of you who come to shows, and who would get more involved if you could. There's no bitterness afoot, no regret, nothing like that. Just the growing awareness of my own human frailty.— Mark