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May 28, 2008
Dear Nields friends and fans,
This June, Katryna and I are going to do something we've wanted to do for years: a sing along show.
We "learned" folk music this way: by sitting at the feet of our guitar playing father who seemed to know all the words to all the songs in the world (and our dad, in turn, had learned at the feet of Pete Seeger, who, blacklisted at the time, came to play at our dad's school because Pete's brother was a geography teacher there). By singing along with our music teachers who had learned at the feet of the great Jack Langstaff. By singing along around the campfires in the Adirondacks, where it seemed as though almost every guest had a stringed instrument and a wonderful song to share. And by singing along in the back of the schoolbus, or with our ears up against the speakers of our friends' stereos, or along to the radio in the backseat of the car. This is the way music USED to be passed along, before the age of iTunes and emailing mp3s. For Christmas last year, my husband Tom organized all our sing along books, and I just spent the weekend going through them, picking out my favorites. Katryna is adding hers, and we're being joined by longtime friend Hugh Blumenfeld and new friend Ben Ross, and hopefully, you, for a sing along concert to end all sing along concerts, this Sunday, June 1 at Edwards Church in Northampton, MA at 6:30pm (tickets $10 at Serios, Pleasant St. Video or Cooper's Corner Market in Florence.) This event is a benefit for First Churches of Northampton, a spiritual and cultural local treasure (it's the big brownstone church across the street from the Iron Horse.) They need a new roof, and we want to help. So come, lend your voices and sing along! http://www.firstchurches.org/nields.pdf.
Other shows:
On May 31, we added a local benefit for William's preschool better known as Ashfield Community Preschool. There is a Mayfair there in the morning from 10-1 and then at 1:30 Nerissa and Katryna will sing a set of family music replete with songs of the spring! The Mayfair includes a maypole and other such delights. There will also be a cool bluegrass band closing the show. Ashfield Community Preschool is on Baptist Hill Road in Ashfield. In case of rain we will be at the church on the main drag in Ashfield. If you live in the hills of western MA and you have a kid, this will be a super fun event for your family!
June 7: Rhode Island Sustainable Living Festival, Coventry, RI. How cool is this festival? In addition to having amazing acts (like Cheryl Wheeler and Gandalf Murphy and the Slambovian Circus of Dreams), they also have round the clock workshops on sustainable living, such as "What Is Biodiesel?" and "How to Start Your Own Community Garden." We are SO THERE! Oh, yeah, we have to be. But we would go even if they WEREN'T paying us!
June 20: How to Be an Adult reading at Cup & Top in Florence, MA 5:30pm reading. (Singing happens too — like all our books, this one has a soundtrack.)
June 26: We're at the Cushman Library in Bernardston, MA for an 7pm show. 413-648-5402. free show outside by the pond, come listen to the music and feed the ducks.
In other news:
How to Be an Adult is selling like hotcakes! Thank you for buying it! We have a new blog to go along with the book, to answer questions, GET answers to questions (for the topic of how to be an adult is endless, and even though we wrote a book, we are still mostly clueless and could use any advice you want to give us). We'd like to see how other people handle the various obstacles that come up in the fine art of living a life. www.howtobeanadult.com. Today's post is about what to do if you need to go to the bathroom while you're on the road and the next rest stop is 50 miles away. Check out the review below from the Hampshire Gazette.
Our regular Nields blog has an address change, which might not yet be reflected on our website. It's nerissanields.blogspot.com. I try to write a new blog at least once a month, so please come visit.
We finished tracking Rock All Day Rock All Night and Dave Chalfant is putting on the finishing touches! It will be out by Falcon Ridge.
Much more to come in July! Meanwhile, happy June!
Love, Nerissa and Katryna
Review of How to be an Adult
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
DAILY HAMPSHIRE GAZETTE
Book Bag
By SUZANNE WILSON Staff Writer
"How To Be An Adult: A Musician's Guide to Navigating Your Twenties"
Nerissa Nields
Illustrated by Katryna Nields
In her introduction, Nerissa Nields writes that this book was originally her younger sister's idea. Katryna, she says, "had just graduated from college and felt clueless ... while trying to figure out things like how to get health insurance and how to pay her taxes on the nonexistent income of a budding folk singer. How are we supposed to know any of this stuff?"
Excellent question. The result is this book, a collaborative work from the sisters who live in this area and have been making music together since 1991. Though the book is written in a breezy, often entertaining, manner, it is in fact packed with practical advice gleaned from interviews the author did with, as she points out, "over 35 actual adults."
The table of contents by itself is worth the price of admission. Among the chapter headings: "How to decide what you want to be when you grow up"; "Failure"; "Organized religion"; "Eight cheap forms of therapy"; "Trash"; "Finding roommates"; "Should you buy or rent"; "Debt"; "Mail clutter"; "Laundry"; "How to fix a broken toilet"; "How to keep in touch with parents."
Jill Stratton, associate dean of students at Washington University in St. Louis, writes that, "As someone who works with college students on a daily basis, I have been waiting for this book to be written. Nields is the big sister and coach we all need when embarking on such an adventure."
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May 1, 2008
Hello, everybodeeeeee!!!
Ah, spring has sprung. Even though it's 48 degrees and raining, I have lost my annual fear that spring will never ever arrive. We have tulips, we have lilacs, we have ants. Lila likes to pat them. We are celebrating spring with some major events.
News! How to Be an Adult available for online order shortly and at shows starting this weekend May 3rd!
In 1991, Katryna graduated from college. She was a religion major embarking on a career as a folk singer. She had absolutely no clue how to do anything vaguely grown-up, except drive a car. But she didn't know how to take care of the car, change its registration from Virginia to Connecticut, figure out how to get health insurance, or put together a balanced meal. Naturally, she turned to me, her older sister with whom she lived. Except for the balanced meal part, I wasn't much help to her (and come to think of it, it took me until about 1998 to realize a meal needed to have protein in it to be considered "balanced"). "Can we go to the book store and find a book called How to Be an Adult?" she asked. We could go to the bookstore, and there even was a book by that title (it's by David Richo and it's a handbook for psychological growth––really great, but not what she wanted). So she decided we should write such a book. That meant we would have to do research, and we were busy trying to get famous in our folk-rock band, The Nields.
Fast-forward fifteen years. I'm pregnant and Katryna is the mother of two kids. Neither of us knows how to be an adult, but we've been passing pretty effectively for several years now (at least we fooled her kids). But something about being pregnant lit a fire under me, and I decided the time had come to finally write this book. I figured the research would do me good. And so, folks, two years later, I am pregnant again and the book is coming out on May 1!
Some of the topics we cover:
- How to figure out what you want to be when you grow up
- How to get a job
- How to get along with annoying people
- How to take care of yourself, inside and out (nutrition, exercise, mental health, etc.)
- How to be a good citizen of the world (and lower your carbon footprint)
- How to rent an apartment
- How to choose a pet
- How to keep your house clean (enough)
- How to fix a broken toilet
- How to have a swell dinner party
- How to cook lots of yummy things
- How to budget and save
- How to get insurance – health, auto, life
- How to take care of your car
- How to register to vote
- How to date
- How to get married
- How to get divorced
- And some final thoughts on parenthood
The book will be available from our website www.nields.com which will link you to our store at www.bulletproofartists.com and at our shows, as well as from some local bookstores, like Broadside in Northampton where we'll be doing a reading on Wednesday May 21.
May 3rd, we are also celebrating spring with a double header at Passim in Cambridge with our FULL BAND!! Two shows, 7:00pm and 9:30pm. Please come! We will rock the house! (Or the basement, as it were....)
On May 10 (right after my husband Tom graduates from grad school) we are zipping up to Kennebunk, ME to do a show at the Kennebunk Folk Society. I can't wait!! We love Maine, and have such good memories of the last time we were there....in April.
On May 18, a Sunday, we are doing an 11am Children's show at Universal Kids in Northampton. This show is a benefit for Safe Passage, which is a wonderful organization in our town. To read more about what they do, go to http://www.safepass.org.
On May 21, we are doing a reading at Broadside Books in Northampton at 7pm to celebrate the release of How to Be an Adult. There might be some singing too.
Sweet May. Bring it on.
We love you!
Nerissa and Katryna
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April 8, 2008
Hi music fans,
April may be the cruelest month, but after the drubbing we got here in New England this past winter, I say "bring it on!" I just found out that the word "April" is derived from the Greek "Aphrodite," Goddess of Love, who was by turns both charming and aloof. I'm so desperate for spring, I'll take the snow that came today if I still get to keep the crocuses that have been poking up regularly in our gardens for the past few days. I am so grateful for crocuses and tulips and daffodils and forsythia—those hardy power-plants that won't take snow for an answer.
We are so crazy busy this month that it'll be a miracle if a single load of laundry gets done. We're in the middle of recording Rock All Day, Rock All Night, our double family CD. Our father came up from Virginia along with our mother for Easter weekend and we recorded a bunch of songs. After the Easter egg hunt on Sunday, we gathered everyone—including all five grandkids—into the studio and recorded "Bye Bye My Roseanna." It's a long song, and mentions everyone's name in our family. During the very last verse, our nephew fell off his mother's lap and bonked his head on the floor and then, quite reasonably, proceeded to wail. We kept on recording. We figured it would be one of those "I've got blisters on my fingers" moments. And indeed, it was ultimately the thing that got him to stop sobbing; we brought him into the control room and he got to see up on the screen exactly what it looked like acoustically when the "bonk" happened. Dave had to play that part over and over, always to huge gafaws.
We're also finishing up the final touches on our book How to Be an Adult, our complete guide to life and which kitchen utensil goes in what drawer, available May 1, just in time for graduation. (We'll send a super duper mailing in May complete with graphics so you can get a load of it, and also order it.)
And then there are the gigs. April 11 we'll be at the Acoustic Cafe in Bridgeport, CT which has been voted Best Place to Hear Music Anywhere for 3 years in a row by the Fairfield weekly paper. We expect to see leaves on the trees.
April 12 we are too cool for school, opening for Dar Williams and Shawn Mullins at the Calvin Theater in Northampton, our home town (our Iron Horse show, which was supposed to be that day, has been postponed until November.)
April 18 we'll be in New Paltz to a venue we've never played. We love playing venues we've never played. If we play somewhere we've never played, and no one who's ever seen us comes, we pretend to be a different band, usually Gandalf Murphy.
April 19 we are back at the Living Room in the East Village with Dave Chalfant!!!! And Ben Demerath opens. The last time we played here was so fun my mind spun for days. This time, we get to perform a longer set. Wheee!
That's all for April. Katryna's going on vacation to Williamsburg and Nerissa (I) is (am) having a writing retreat. (Also I'm having a baby, but not till August.) Then, in May, we're at Kripalu for Powerful Women, Powerful Voices. It's going to be so great. We will ACTUALIZE YOU! (Not really. But you will learn amazing things about music, your own creativity, your own voice and also get to hear the amazing Eliza Gilkyson, the fabulous Gretchen Peters and, oh yes, us. You can also do yoga during your breaks. And the food is THE BEST!)
To find out why I can no longer watch TV, read newspapers or listen to NPR—or even surf the net—read our blog.
Have a great April and don't let the goddess get you down.
Love, Nerissa and Katryna
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March 6, 2008
Dear friends,
Anne-Marie Strohman, our friend and fan from Mountain View CA, wrote me on January 31 to let me know that February was National Album Writing Month. The challenge is to write 14 songs in the month of February. Since we didn't have anything better to do, besides finish the draft of How To Be An Adult and paint the cover, run HooteNanny, raise our kids, shovel snow and play all over upstate New York, we decided to take on the challenge. The result is 14 brand new (sort of) Nields songs which we will record this week and post on our website shortly. The bad news is we will have to send you a SECOND EMAIL this month to give you the link. This is bad because we promised you up and down to only write you once a month, and here we go breaking that promise for a second month in a row. Sorry. I will also post a commentary about the songs on our blog, May Day Cafe, at www.nields.com/blog.
So about these songs: some are good, some are, well, songs we wrote to meet our quota. Some are destined for the soundtrack for The Big Idea; others will appear on our new Family CD (tentatively titled Rock All Day, Rock All Night) and some I will sing to Lila in the car.
Besides recording these songs on Garage Band and posting them as soon as possible, here's what we will be up to in March:
Sat. March 8 we will do a double header: a free family show at the Jones Library in Amherst MA in the morning; and then a drive up to the southwestern tip of the Adirondack Park to play a show at Old Forge, purportedly the coldest spot in the Adirondacks. (We just didn't get enough of Western NY in February). The next weekend, March 15, we'll be joining our friends the Kennedys for a blow out show (which seems to be an annual event) at the Joyful Noise Coffeehouse in Lexington, MA. On Sunday the 16th we'll travel to New Hampshire to play at the famed Stone Church.
Easter weekend, March 22-24 our parents are coming to Massachusetts (or as Lila calls it, "Mackatussess") and our father is going to record some songs with us for Rock All Day, Rock All Night. The reason for the title, by the way, is that this will be a double CD: one CD will make you want to bounce up and down. The other CD is full of lullabies and designed for new parents to stick in a CD player to virtually sing their colicky infant to sleep when it's night night time.
 Speaking of new parents, as I said in the last email, I am pregnant. I am already huge. Here is a picture of pregnant me.
We end March at the Sounding Board in West Hartford, one of our all time favorite gigs. Since March came in like a lion, dumping 8 inches of snow on us, we expect it to go out like a lamb.
In May, we are part of an amazing workshop at Kripalu in Lenox, MA. It's called Powerful Women, Powerful Voices and it's with Eliza Gilkyson, Gretchen Peters and Val Denn. More info is here, but this is an opportunity not to be missed if you are a songwriter or artist of any kind. And Kripalu is perhaps my favorite place on earth.
I just found this from Marv Hiles, writer of a little book called "All the Days of My Life":
"The only way to live spring is to let her sun and shadow pass softly through us. Ultimately, spring teaches us that to fight against what is, is foolishness. When the cherry blossom falls and we realize how few days comprise our lives, we fall with the petal. Life is in the falling, not the staying."
Happy spring! We love you!
Nerissa and Katryna
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February 22
Dear Reader,
I know we've promised you up, down and sideways that we will not send you more than one email a month, but Patty's making me write this special report. And it's not breaking news about illegal campaign contributions or tainted beef either.
I am pregnant.
(It's on purpose. We are very, very, very happy).
And I know the question on everyone's mind is: will you still be at Falcon Ridge this summer?
Answer: if they have us, we will come. My baby is due August 26, so though I will be huge, I will be there, even if they need to airlift me to and fro.
However, that will be the last show we do. Until October. I know, heck of a short maternity leave, but what can you do? I have a tough boss. (Katryna. Also, me.)
Lila is very excited. Every night she says, "I want to see the baby." Then I pull up my shirt and she kisses my stomach. She also says she has a baby in HER stomach, naturally.
So there you have it. Be well, and we will write you again in a week or so to tell you what's doing in March.
Love, Nerissa
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February 6, 2008
Big news, folks!
After seventeen years of scheming and two years of writing and drawing, our book, How To Be An Adult, is finally ready for publication. How To Be An Adult is Katryna's brainchild. As a college graduate living with her clueless older sister, she quickly found herself mired in mysterious mail with initials like "DMV" and "IRS." Was she still being covered by our father's health care? What did a cobra have to do with that, anyway? "Someone should write a book," she declared. And so, when I became an adult (last year), I did.
It'll be out by May, in time for college graduation. You can order it through the Bulletproof store at www.nields.com. More on this to come in future writings, but now — on to the shows!
Katryna and I are heading to western NY a whole lot this month. The powers that be, in their infinite wisdom, know that the best place for intrepid folk singers in February was balmy Buffalo and not, say, Tampa. Actually, we are really psyched to go to western NY--we haven't been there in a long time and we miss the scenery. Also the Buffalo wings. And most of all, our friends and fans who come out to see us. Plus, any chance for me to hang out with my cool sister for hours and hours, stopping to pick up litter and otherwise eco-preach along the way, is bound to be a good time.
I just found out that the economic index that measures how service workers are doing recently plummeted, which is the reason the Dow tanked today. I also just found out that we are service workers. That in a recession (not that I'm saying we're in one!!) service workers are the first to suffer. Think about it--when your budget is tight, do you cut your electricity bill or your monthly massage? So, do a good thing for the economy and support your local service worker by coming to our shows this month! Fight the power!
We are also playing in Rhode Island on Feb. 16 at an amazing theatre.
The weekend after that, Feb. 22 etc. we'll be in Midwestern NY--Utica and Ithaca, towns we know and love well. I plan to visit the Moosewood Restaurant while in Ithaca and pay my respects.
One more thing: our friend Anne-Marie Strohman from California wrote us to say that February is Album Writing Month (www.fawm.org). The challenge is to write 14 songs within the month. So far we have two, but it's Feb. 6 today and I have a date with the muse at 1pm. We'll be playing our assignments at the gigs this month.
Be well, stay healthy, and congrats to the Giants fans, condolences to the Patriots fans, and may the best and most honest, honorable, wonderful, hopeful (and brilliant and visionary) presidential candidate win!
Love, Nerissa
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News Of Note
- Nerissa continues to teach songwriting and writing workshops in Northampton, for both adults and teens. All the info is here.
- A great interview with Nerissa is here.
- Read Nerissa's cover story in the New Haven Advocate here.
- Listen to Nerissa & Katryna on NPR's Here & Now.
The broadcast is archived here.
- Listen to Nerissa discuss "When I'm Here" on NPR's All Things Considered. The commentary is archived here.
- Listen to Nerissa & Katryna's appearance on WFUV's Sunday Breakfast, archived here.
now available in bookstores
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