The Maine Songwriters Association (MSA) will host its 13th Annual Song Contest in the new Founders Hall at 317 Main Community Music Center, located at 317 Main St. in Yarmouth.
The contest, featuring some of the best music Maine has to offer, is scheduled for 7-9 p.m. Friday, Nov. 3.
This year, MSA received an unprecedented 52 entries. The screening panel faced the challenging task of narrowing down these exceptional entries to select the final six songs. The finalists are Peter Carriveau, Doug Cowan, Jane Fallon, Seth Gallant, Owen Howes and Kate McCann.
Carriveau is a singer-songwriter living in Monmouth. Inspired by the Beatles, he formed his first musical group with his brothers at age 9. This led to a series of bands that helped pay his way through college. After grad school, he stopped performing publicly, and taught history for 34 years. Upon his retirement from teaching, Carriveau began playing again as a soloist at area venues. He also plays in a trio (“The Boondock Sinners”) during summers with his snowbird friends Paul and Donna Landry Duffy. Carriveau’s music and writing are influenced by elements of Americana, folk, and rock, from artists such as John Prine, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. He was a 2023 finalist in the Rose Garden Performing Songwriters Competition, and a finalist in the Maine Songwriters Association song contest in 2020 and 2023.
Doug Cowan was born and bred in rural Maine, surviving on K-Tel Hits albums until discovering his brother’s record collection in the early ’80s, which consisted mostly of early Neil Young and Elvis Costello vinyl. Adopting the apparent DIY attitude growing in underground music, he took two guitar lessons, ignoring everything but three barr chords, and promptly started a punk band without a name. Then cobbled together bands with names like Pluck Theatre, Bullyclub, and most recently, the Welterweight collective, which has been the delivery system for his singer/songwriter-ly output of “hard soft rock” over the past decade.
Jane Fallon was known to write songs in her playpen, according to her mother. A love of language led her to a career in teaching English, and that, combined with musical genetics, has kept her writing and singing her entire life. She has eight CDs and three books to her credit and has won many songwriting awards including the Woody Guthrie Songwriting Competition, The American Songwriter Magazine Lyric Contest, the Will McLean Festival, and the South Florida Folk Festival. Favorite topics include history and the environment. Her songwriting has led her from the Clancy Brothers Festival in Ireland to the Port Gamble Festival in Washington, and places in-between. After 35 years in New Hampshire, she relocated to Dunedin, Florida to be near family and is gratified to have been welcomed into the Florida Folk community, performing at festivals and featuring on local radio: however, New England will always be home!
Seth Gallant grew up in a mill town to a family that played music on the front porch on almost any occasion. These traditions of folk, country, and Acadian music would shape the music that Gallant writes and performs today. Gallant is currently writing an album of songs based on the lives of those who came to settle the industrial towns of New England.
Owen Howes has been writing songs for 15 years, but things have gotten more serious during the last five. He is currently cutting timber frames in a little second-generation sawmill on the Bowdoin-Lisbon line and, although he loves the work, harbors an unflagging dream of full-time musicianship. He has fished for lobster on an out island while living in a homebuilt teardrop trailer, crossed the Atlantic in a 37-foot sailboat, and walked from Canada to Mexico via the Pacific Crest Trail, but his most important journey was the one into sobriety. In 2020, he wrote and released his first full-length record with enormous help from his former band, “Silver Heels,” which is available for streaming on all platforms. He has struck out on a solo musical journey over the last six months and is currently working on a second debut record while drawing up a camper shell he can use to bring it to the people.
Princess Pine is the solo project of Kate McCann – a folk singer and banjo player who plays both original and traditional music in the folk tradition. With a background in old-time music, Irish ballads, and sea chanteys, Kate likes to explore how traditional music exists in the contemporary world not as a static artifact of the past but as an active practice that both the musician and audience can engage with. She has recently begun composing and recording more original songs and released her first EP “Sea Songs,” this summer. She is also a regular DJ on local community radio station WERU’s old-time program “High on a Mountain.”
The Maine Songwriters Association is a statewide, nonprofit member organization dedicated to the support of songwriters and their art.
Tickets can be purchased at mainesongwriters.org/asp-products/2023-songwriting-contest-finals/. For more information, visit mainesongwriters.org.
Comments are not available on this story.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
