Joe Crookston

Jake Armerding


The Boston Globe calls singer-violinist Jake Armerding "the most gifted and promising songwriter to emerge from the Boston folk scene in years."

"This is organic music," the Boston singer-songwriter-violinist offers about his fifth album of originals, Her. "It's a bunch of us playing our instruments and singing, and getting taped while we're doing it. There's no pitch correction, no chemicals, no nothing." Armerding, along with some of the best players on the East Coast scene, holed up in a studio in North Reading, MA just before last Christmas, got completely snowed in, and made some beautiful, raucous, lasting music. Armerding confides, "For years I've been trying to get away from love songs -- everybody writes them, they're the easiest to write, all that stuff. But then I fell in love and got married, so it wasn't really an option." Singer and songwriter Mark Erelli, a longtime friend and colleague who contributed guitar and vocal tracks to the project, commented, "It's pretty great to listen to a whole record of love songs and not hear any of the usual love song cliches."

It was the early 1980s when Boston bluegrasser Taylor Armerding, co-founder of the band Northern Lights, started his 5-year-old son, Jake, on Suzuki violin. Jake studied classical violin into high school and absorbed bluegrass just by being around the house. At 13, he joined Northern Lights on fiddle and recorded three albums with the band during his high school and college years. He soon turned his attention to songwriting, and recorded his first CD, Caged Bird, while at Wheaton College (IL). In 2003, Nashville independent label Compass released Jake Armerding, a collection of folk-pop songs written over a year living in Music City. The Washington Post lauded Armerding's instrumental skills as "remarkable," while the Boston Globe heralded him "a master at bending boundaries ... his real achievement has been to break the conventions that define country music."

Armerding recently logged his thousandth performance. He has shared the stage with Bela Fleck, Nickel Creek, Josh Ritter, David Wilcox and Toad the Wet Sprocket.