By Katy Savage, Standard Staff
When you think of musicians and recording studios, you think of cities like Nashville, Los Angeles and New York City. A group is trying to add Bridgewater to that list.
Up Holiday Farm Road, far off in the woods on a 500-acre property surrounded by trees and farm animals, there are plans to turn an old red barn in front of an alpaca heard into a recording studio and build creative spaces beside it.
The farmland would be a place for writers to finish their last chapters of a novel, a painter to work on a large painting and or a musician the next hit. As they look out at horses grazing the grass, alpacas and the rolling hills, the thought is they’ll find inspiration.
A group of 25 musicians from those large cities test-ran that concept last week, spending three days living at the farm. As part of the first Songwriters Festival, the musicians lived in cabins, in a camp-like setting. They wrote songs during the day in groups and picked guitars at night while a California chef prepared their meals for them, delivered to their door.
They finished 21 new songs together. Then on Thursday they threw a free concert for the community.
Charlie Peacock, a producer and Grammy Award winner, stands with alpaca behind him.
He brought platinum-selling musician Kris Allen with him along with Matt Slocum, writer of the famous song “Kiss Me,” who is also lead guitarist of the band Sixpence None the Richer. Nashville-based Marc Beeson, who wrote the country hits, “When She Cries” and “We Are Tonight,” was there along with more than a dozen emerging artists.
They worked on a “10s and 2s” schedule like the family-oriented music scene in Nashville. There, musicians record or write from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., eat lunch and then work on another song from 2 to 5 p.m., Peacock said. The more energized work again from 6 to 9 p.m.
Why would they all spend time in a 900-person Vermont town most have never heard of?
The land.
Marc Beeson, the co-writer of Restless Heart’s “When She Cries” sings his song at the festival.
The site, known as the Ottauquechee Farm, was a Christian retreat for decades until John and Jean Kingston purchased it in 2011 to add a creative sanctuary component for all artists from all religious groups to the Christian land. They and a handful of professionals, including Peacock, Makoto Fujimura, an artist who served on the National Council on the Arts from 2003-2009, Bruce Herman, an artist in Massachusetts and Cameron Anderson, the executive director of Christians in the Visual Arts.
“This is our guinea pig,” Peacock said on Monday, the day before the musicians were scheduled to arrive at the farm. Though Vermont doesn’t have all the connections that the cities the musicians hail from have, he sees Ottauquechee Farm becoming a place for them to recharge.
“We can help people see it as a destination for the creative life, a destination for inspiration,” he said.
The Thursday night concert was a casual evening. The musicians sang songs on stage they had just finished writing a couple days before. Some of them held cell phones with the lyrics typed in front of their faces so they didn’t forget the words. They cheered each other on, playing with a menagerie of horses, animals and hills in the background and fellow musicians standing off stage behind them, drinking beer or laughing with each other.
Some of them played their hits. Slocom strummed his guitar to “Kiss Me” while Marc Beeson sang “When She Cries,” the song he wrote 23 years ago with partner Sonny LeMaire. He was struggling with it, he told the audience, until he was told a story about falling in love in a bowling alley in Lexington, Kentucky.
Allen played his top selling song “Live Like We’re Dying.”
He also played “In Time,” a song from his new album, about his life altering car crash in 2013 that left him with a broken wrist.
Allen’s son Oliver played with his stroller on the grass. At the end of the evening, the musicians gathered on stage and sang “Happy Birthday” to Allen’s son Oliver, who turned 2 last Thursday.
“Got some of the best singers and artists to sing, ‘Happy Birthday’ to him,” he later wrote on Instagram.
“It’s been a really nice, peaceful, quiet time,” Allen said at the concert, “and when you live in a city you don’t get that.”
In Nashville, Peacock said artists ask themselves three questions when working on music with others.
“Good money? Good music? Good hang?” Peacock said.
In this case the good hang — the people — made putting the Songwriters Festival together worth it to Peacock.
The Songwriters Festival was funded by The Sword and Spoon Foundation, a Kingston company, in addition to three companies of Peacock’s.
Peacock produced the Civil Wars’ 2011 album “Barton Hollow,” which earned a Grammy for Best Folk Album and Country Duo Performance. He produced American Idol season eight winner Allen’s 2014 album “Horizon” and he produced “Dare You to Move” for Switchfoot. Peacock met the owners of Ottauquechee Farm six years ago at an auction in Malibu, California to benefit Peacock’s charity, Art House America. John Kingston bid on an evening at Peacock’s home in Nashville.
It didn’t take much convincing him to be part of the artist colony. He remembers “basically sliding into Vermont” during a snowstorm touring one year in Toronto.
“I remember thinking, ‘This place is gorgeous,’” he said.
The first thing he did was buy maple syrup.
The organizers hope to continue the event annually.
“The time and space is definitely something artists don’t get enough of. To have all their needs tended to …that’s a real gift,” said Keri Wiederspahn, who is the resident director of the Ottauquechee Farm.
There are plans to add donkeys to the list of farm animals and two Arabian horses at Lucy Mackenzie Humane Society that were last fall rescued from a South Woodstock farm.
“It’s nice to be able to give something back to the community,” Wiederspahn said.
This article first appeared in the August 6, 2015 edition of the Vermont Standard.
Alpaca run along a fence at the Ottauquechee Farm in Bridgewater just days before a free concert was going to take place there. (Katy Savage Photo)