BELLOWS FALLS-“Comin’ down off summer / Comin’ down off fall / All I got’s a handful of festival laminates / hangin’ on my wall,” sings Ruth Ungar of the Mammals on her song “Coming Down Off Summer” — a song she wrote about leaving the excitement of festival season and returning home to the everyday routine.
Ungar knows the experience well, as The Mammals, the dynamic five-piece folk-rock band that she leads with her husband, Mike Merenda, play plenty of festivals during the warm weather months.
One they will be playing this summer is the Folk, Roots, and Americana Music Festival on Saturday, July 18, at 4 p.m. at Robertson Paper Company Field, 21 Island St., in Bellows Falls.
The show is part of the Bandwagon Summer Series presented by Next Stage Arts. The family-friendly outdoor cultural performance series runs from June through September at various locations in Putney, Brattleboro, Dummerston, and Bellows Falls.
In addition to the Mammals, who will headline the event, the festival will feature singer-songwriter Michael Veitch, a former Bellows Falls resident, as well as Brattleboro-based vocal and string quartet Doozy Jane.
Genre-blurring music
The Mammals, from the Hudson Valley in New York, is a longtime favorite in the area. Barry Stockwell, programming and production director for Next Stage Arts, said this will be the band’s third time performing at one of the Bandwagon Summer Series shows.
“We’re really looking forward to bringing them back to southern Vermont,” he said, predicting that it will be “an amazing afternoon of music.”
Fiddle player Ungar, the daughter of singer Lyn Hardy and fiddle virtuoso and composer Jay Ungar, grew up immersed in the world of folk music. Merenda had played guitar and drums in rock bands since high school, but when he met Ungar he was inspired by her folk background and started playing banjo. In 2001, while living in western Massachusetts, they met Tao Rodríguez-Seeger and formed the Mammals.
The band’s genre-blurring music blends traditional folk instruments (fiddle, banjo, acoustic guitar) with a fuller rock rhythm section (drums, bass, and keyboards).
“Too folk for the rock show, and too rock for the folk show” is how Ungar has typically described their sound, which also leans heavily on politically charged lyrics.
The group began as a trio but soon added more musicians and became known for energetic live performances.
By 2008, Rodríguez-Seeger had left the group, and Merenda and Ungar continued as a duo. In 2017, they revived the full band and have been performing together ever since.
Two new albums, four years in the making
Last fall, The Mammals released two albums, Touch Grass Vol. 1 and Touch Grass Vol. 2, with a total of 17 songs, on the same day.
“We would probably record that many songs for an album, but pare it down and then have some bonus songs or some stuff to save for later,” Merenda explained in a recent phone conversation with the couple. “But these just sort of fell into two nice categories of a more sunny, upbeat album, and then a more contemplative, dreaming nighttime album.”
The project was four years in the making and recorded at their home studio, which Ungar described as a “very laid-back experience.”
The couple writes separately, and their work has always straddled political and the personal themes, which is evident on these two albums. Vol. 1 focuses more on socially conscious tracks, and Vol. 2 features more reflective songs.
Both musicians emphasize that they now focus less on issues they are against and more on what they support. As a result, the albums explore themes such as friendship, kindness, and community as forms of resistance.
“There is plenty to sing about these days, but mostly instead of pointing fingers — left versus right — we are kind of looking ‘up’ versus ‘down,’” said Merenda. “Which is what we’ve always been singing about. But it took us a long time to kind of crystallize those ideas so that they are less polarizing and more universal.”
Music as a vehicle for connecting
They started work on the albums during the pandemic lockdown, which greatly impacted the project. During this time, they gained an even deeper understanding of the importance of music in bringing people together and in creating community.
“After going through lockdown, and it being so challenging to get people together, we realized our mental health as individuals and our cultural health depend on gathering,” said Ungar.
“And music is a vehicle for gathering, and songs are a vehicle for making that gathering feel connected and making people feel connected to us, to each other, to themselves, to history, to the person they’re sitting next to,” she said. “That is the biggest mission, I think — more than focusing on a particular issue that is hot in the news that day.”
And what better way to do that than playing at festivals?
“We are excited to be back at Folk, Roots, and Americana Festival again! We always enjoy the crowd in southern Vermont,” Ungar said.
She and Merenda are festival coordinators for the Summer Hoot, a folk roots festival in the Hudson Valley, and as such, “we understand the work it takes to pull this kind of thing together.”
“Anything produced by Next Stage is very warm and welcoming for the musicians as well as the audience,” Ungar said, calling it “the kind of event that builds and strengthens the feeling of community.”
“Similar to 2024, I’m looking forward to hearing and meeting the other bands and connecting with fans of all ages in a relaxed atmosphere,” she said.
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Tickets are $28 in advance, $32 at the door. Children under 12 are admitted for free. Audience members are encouraged to bring blankets, chairs, and picnics. Food vendors will be on site. Gates open at 3 p.m. For information, visit nextstagearts.org.
This Arts item by Sheryl Hunter was written for The Commons.