Big City Folk Song Club (Fall 2024)

Big City Folk Song Club host Niall Connolly has released eight studio albums, a live album and an EP. His latest album, Dream Your Way Out of This One, features collaborations with his long term NYC band as well as guest appearances from Glen Hansard (Once, The Frames, The Swell Season), Javier Más (Leonard Cohen’s band) and Deni Bonet (REM, Cyndi Lauper, Sarah McLachlan).

Connolly has toured all over Europe and the US, including festival appearances at Glastonbury, CMJ, Prague Fringe Festival, Acoustic Festival Düsseldorf, Cork Folk Festival, and Cuala NYC. He has opened for Glen Hansard, Lisa Hannigan, Lucius, Evan Dando, Eugene Kelly, Lambchop, Mick Flannery, Wallis Bird, Damien Dempsey, MisterWives, and more.

He is the founder of Big City Folk Collective. Big City Folk hosts over 100 events annually throughout New York, a concert series in Woodstock, and a biennial music festival.

"An absolutely beautiful collection of songs...I was gobsmacked by the quality of the songwriting... accomplished composition and arrangements...4 stars."—Arena, RTÉ Radio 1

"Terrific. Disarming and beautifully crafted folk-pop. Connolly is a witty storyteller and not-to-be-missed songsmith."—Chicago Tribune

"Connolly's songs are both sad and uplifting. They're real. They speak to the goodness in people, that need to do something to make the world just a little better."—Budapest Times

"Amongst the most vibrant, poignant, and authentic indie folk artists in New York City."—No Depression

Championed by radio legends such as BBC’s Bob Harris, BBC Scotland's, Ricky Ross, and Chicago radio WFMT's Rich Warren, Jones has toured with Richard Thompson and Mary Gauthier, shared the stage with Peggy Seeger and Nick Lowe, appeared on BBC4 Folk America, played the Cambridge Folk Festival Main Stage, and was a guest on the Jools Holland Show. She continued touring internationally appearing on BBC4 Songwriter Sessions with Steve Earle and Tom Morello. Diana has seven original recordings through Proper Records and her progressive, yet historically rich, songs have been recorded by artists including Joan Baez, Iris DeMent, and Gretchen Peters and have won her numerous folk festival awards including New Song Festival, The Kerrville New Folk Award among others.

Kendra McKinley is a Hudson Valley-based singer, songwriter, and bandleader whose songs burst with color, wonder, sensuality, and wit. Fusing the sounds of Neo-soul, jazz, and psychedelia, McKinley draws from a deep well of empathy. Whether she’s performing solo with a guitar and a looping pedal, fronting a full-funk band, or collaborating with local and global artists, McKinley’s confident, honeyed voice enacts a gravitational pull on all who hear it.

A Nashville-born son of a Hall of Fame country songwriter (the late Charlie Black), Nada Rien writes in a literary style about the problem of having a human mind in an animal's body, like if Dostoevsky had grown up near Music Row, like if Hemingway had a mental illness and could finger pick. He began his musical career as a professional songwriter in Nashville at 19, one of the youngest writers on the Row at the time. When it dawned on him with a slow violence that his songs weren't fit for the commercial country music biz, he lit out for LA and began to record his own stuff. 

 Since then, he has released four LPs: Vacations (Nonexistent Records), It Shapes Me As It Goes (Nonexistent Records), Lay You In The Loam (Catbeach Records), and See the Black Sea (Nonexistent Records USA, Tonetoaster Records Europe). All were released under his given name, Casey Black. 

 In 2016 fate struck a blow, and Casey Black entered a kind of musical dissociation, during which he played and wrote little, and recorded nothing. He became a father and lost his father. He earned a master's degree and became a therapist. But some kind of emptiness persisted. So he returned to therapy and took regular long night walks under the influence of substance and music. One day in 2023 he woke up and music had moved back in, pretending it had never left in the first place. Only it had taken up the name Nada Rien. 

Having exhumed and renamed himself, Nada Rien set about making a record about his musical dissociation and returning on tour to Ireland. The EP, Simulacra, explores the roots and expressions of psychological suffering. It was released on August 23.

 Nada Rien is now working on two EPs to be released in early 2025.