Martha Scanlan & Jon Neufeld

Anyone familiar with Martha Scanlan and Jon Neufeld’s unique alchemy on stage will not be surprised by the sense of being taken into the moment their shows are in and of themselves a journey of improvisation. The way Jon Neufeld’s innovative guitar playing weaves effortlessly around Scanlan’s timeless songwriting is simply magical.
They met playing together at Portland’s indie-roots festival, Pickathon, in 2010, shortly before recording Tongue River Stories, a beautifully stark album of field recordings captured on film at the 120-year-old family ranch where Martha was living and working in a remote corner of southeast Montana (The Meadow on YouTube is a stunning introduction). “
“I wanted to record songs in the places where they were written,” Martha says. “There is such a beautiful intimacy with the landscape in ranch work and in the place itself, stories inside of stories inside of stories.”