After helping raise $25,000 to upgrade the Edmond Town Hall Theatre with contemporary lighting and sound equipment, Newtown resident Hayden Bates is just days away from an encore return of his ETH Concert Series, which will feature the return of Hiss Golden Messenger headlining, and a homecoming set from MorganEve Swain.

In separate calls over the past few days, Bates, Swain and MC Taylor - who's Hiss Golden Messenger has featured a cast of backing players over the years - each discussed their latest projects, and how excited they are to be converging back on stage in Newtown Saturday, November 12.

Doors for the concert open at 6:30 pm, with music to start at 7. Tickets are $20 and are available online now at .edmondtownhall.org/liveateth

Bates announced in 2015 that he had reached a benchmark in his fundraising, and that his series of intimate and eclectic performers that included Spirit Family Reunion, Quiet Life, Mark Kozelek, The Autumn Defense, The Low Anthem, Phosphorescent, and MorganEve Swain's Brown Bird, was going on "indefinite hiatus."

But he told The Bee that he couldn't resist re-activating the series when Taylor came calling asking if the venue was available for a return engagement when Hiss headed to the northeast promoting the newly released Heart Like a Levee.

At the same time, he was excited to learn that the Town Hall Board of Managers was ramping up to developing more live concerts in the venue.

"I'm really excited to hear that because that was my goal from the beginning," he said. "But we needed to build the infrastructure inside the venue where you could have a sustainable revenue generating situation - where other promoters could come in and utilize the space."

Back in 2009,when the ETH Concert Series kicked off, Bates admitted he didn't know what he was doing. He just knew that no promoter was interested in using the theater for live shows because of the inferior electrical, and lighting as well as the lack of any capable sound reinforcement.

"Now I think it's on the cusp of generating enough excitement that the entire community can get behind the effort," Bates said. "It's not enough for just the board to want to make it happen, their plans need to be out there so the community can tell them what they want in an event center."

To that end, Bates said he would not be averse to promoting a "big ticket" one off fundraiser to help inject some new capital funding toward the effort. He noted that the Ridgefield Playhouse, which hosts countless big name performers each year, started out small and has amassed a huge, tri-state following that puts fans in the seats - sometimes three or four nights a week.

After 14 shows, Bates says each artist has had "phenomenally positive" reaction to the ETH Theater space.

"It continues to be a recurring theme, saying this has been the best sounding venue. And they are playing some big name venues - however a lot of those venues are built for more seats, and not necessarily for acoustical perfection like our theater," he said.

Besides Taylor and his band, one of the only other returning acts in the ETH Concert Series is Swain, who grew up in Newtown and went on to form Brown Bird with her late husband, David Lamb.

Lamb lost his battle with leukemia in 2014, and Swain told The Bee that she used songwriting as something of a healing practice, although she crafted the material so it would not be overly introspective or melancholy.

Swain was something of a violin prodigy, picking up the violin at age 3 and developing her talents under the guidance of local Suzuki Music School mentors. Today, she can handle songwriting, singing, and performing on "basically anything with strings on it."

She has a new band called The Huntress And Holder Of Hands featuring her brother, and all of the material except for possibly a cover tune were created in the spring after she lost her husband.

"I made a conscious decision that I either gotta do this now, or I might never do it ever again," she said. "On the other hand, it was also like discovering muscle memory - writing music made sense and to some extent it served as therapy for me. The loss and the grief has all informed what I'm writing now, which is all over the place stylistically.

"But I didn't want this record to be all 'woe is me' because that's not the music I want to put out - and it's not helpful for me to wallow. Musically it's not somber. It's rooted more in rock than any Brown Bird material we ever did."

Swain's intriguing instrumentation includes her handling viola and vocals, along with drums, cello, string bass, and guitar. Three vocals provide lush harmony which make Swain's new material sound "very complete."

"I'm very proud of it," she said.

It seems appropriate this ETH Concert Series reboot will feature headliner Taylor and Hiss Golden Messenger - the last band to appear in the series back in 2015 when the singer/songwriter was just finishing the material for his new album, Heart Like a Levee.

He told The Bee that the upcoming set will include a smattering of selections from that new project, as well as a range of material from the Hiss catalog.

In the months since Taylor completed recording his new album, he said the material has been transitioning splendidly to the concert stage.

"The songs feel very similar to how we laid them down on the record," he said. "They are becoming and growing into the core essence of what the songs have always wanted to be. Early on, there were some arrangement things and instrumentation things we didn't quite understand about the songs, but they are clear now."

While the diverse arrangements, instrumentation and vocal stylings showcase exceptional songwriting and production talent - almost sounding like they were each performed by different bands with the same singer - Taylor says they were all conceived to be part of the same thematic unit.

"It was always my intention to make this a cohesive album," he said. "To me it all sounds like it's of a piece - because we did use the same players and the same voice and themes. But we do cover a lot of ground on this record."

Taylor said he wrote a lot of material for Heart Like a Levee, multi-tracking various parts in his home studio as demos.

"So when I stumbled onto a song that felt right - that I'd be able to live with it for the rest of my performing days - I would sketch out some ideas," he said. "I normally write with some lyrical ideas, chord changes or a lead melody in mind. Or I would have one or two other melodic lines to carry the harmonic content of the song. So if I can get that down with an idea of how the rhythm of that song will be - it gets me pretty far down the road."

Taylor and Hiss will be pretty far down the road of their American tour leg when they arrive in Newtown November 12, with plans to hit Belgium, the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands before heading back to the states for the holidays in December.

Learn more about Hiss Golden Messenger at: mergerecords.com/hiss-golden-

messenger

Keep up with Newtowner MorganEve Swain at: http://brownbird.net/the-

huntress/

Check out a video for Hiss Golden Messenger's new single 'Biloxi' :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrfx6-Im_0U

Hiss performs the title track to MC Tayor's new album Heart Like a Levee live at Duke University in November 2015:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzYJSwuBGw8

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