Just Announced: Natalie Merchant Joins the Rough Notes Festival Lineup August 29
The singer-songwriter will play piano and talk craft with Folk Alley's Sarah LaDuke — tickets likely to move fast for the festival's second night.
Saturday, August 29, doors 6:30pm, show 7:30–8:30pm | Kinderhook, NY | Tickets required
Natalie Merchant has just been added to The Rough Notes Festival, joining the second night of Kinderhook's inaugural three-day literary event. The show is billed as an intimate evening: Merchant at the piano, playing and singing while walking the audience through her songwriting process in conversation with Sarah LaDuke, Executive Director of Folk Alley.
The addition is a seemless fit with what Kinderhook Books owner Mindy Kay Bricker set out to build with the festival. As she told us when the lineup was first announced, the goal was never a conventional book festival. "What I really want to do is celebrate the craft of writing in all its forms—stand-up, songwriting, screenwriting, any art that's in conversation with writing," Bricker says. "Not everyone is a reader, but people are drawn to good writing whether they realize it or not. They have a favorite song because they love the lyrics."
Merchant's catalog spans ten solo albums and six albums as the lead singer of 10,000 Maniacs, and her eleventh solo record, Cabinet of Wonder—a collection for children—comes out August 21.
LaDuke, who conducts the conversation portion of the event, brings two decades of experience interviewing musicians as a producer and host at NPR member station WAMC before taking the helm at Folk Alley, the member-supported streaming station now operated under The FreshGrass Foundation. Her career has centered on amplifying women and BIPOC and LGBTQAI+ voices in the arts.
The Saturday-night addition slots into a festival that opens the night before with comedian and Oscar nominee Tig Notaro, whose Friday show at Van Buren Hall sold out.
Given how quickly Friday's Notaro show sold out, and the caliber of this new addition, tickets for Merchant's set are worth grabbing as soon as they're live. Kinderhook Books newsletter subscribers get first access to new releases before anything is posted publicly.
Van Buren Hall, 6 Chatham St., Kinderhook, NY. Tickets at eventbrite.com or theroughnotes.com.
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After a decade of writing for RI (along with many other publications and organizations) Jamie took over as editor in 2025. He has a masters in journalism from NYU, a wonderful wife, two kids and a Carolina dog named Zelda.
