In the early 1970s, the British sketch comedy TV series Monty Python’s Flying Circus promised viewers “something completely different” and then, to the delight of its fans, delivered on that promise.

Over the past five years, doing “something completely different” — performing and recording a cappella country music — has been the key to success for Home Free, the Minnesota-born quintet which will return to Del Crary Park’s Fred Anderson Stage on Wednesday, July 26th as the free Peterborough Musicfest concert season continues.

Founded in 2000 by Chris Rupp, Home Free initially performed music covering a wide variety of genres, country being just one among them. With a series of independent album releases to its credit, Rupp et al auditioned three times for NBC TV’s The Sing-Off and three times came up short.

Enter lead tenor Austin Brown and bass singer Tim Foust and yet another shot at The Sing-Off. Performing country music exclusively, Home Free was accepted and won the show’s fourth season, earning $100,000 and a recording contract with Sony.

“When Tim and I joined, the group moved in the country direction and found that audiences responded well to it,” says Brown in a November 2016 interview with Kevin Wierzbicki of www.axs.com.

“Modern country music takes elements of other genres and we enjoy blending all those elements together like we do with our voices. We enjoy singing in a variety of styles. We have a lot of fun doing it. It has become our identity. No one is doing what we’re doing. We’re the lone (a cappella country) group out there.”

VIDEO: “I Like The Sound of That” by Rascal Flatts performed by Home Free

The evidence points to the enduring wisdom of that decision.

The group’s 2014 album Crazy Life — the first featuring Brown and Rupp — peaked at number eight on the Billboard country chart. Full Of Cheer, released the same year, attained the number 12 spot before 2015’s Country Evolution lifted Home Free to lofty number four status.

The group returns to Peterborough — having performed at Peterborough Musicfest in August 2015 — basking in the success of late 2016 release Full Of (Even More) Cheer, which climbed to number two.

“We do songs that we enjoy as well as what our fans like,” says Brown. “We try to cover some of the popular songs. If they (music fans) come across it on YouTube and see that Home Free does it, it gets more people coming to the show. We also write and record our own music.”

VIDEO: “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash performed by Home Free with Avi Kaplan

Having undergone a number of personnel changes since the group began as basically a hobby, Home Free is now enjoying stability with Brown and Foust joined by Rob Lundquist (tenor harmony), Adam Chance (baritone harmony) and founder Chris Rupp’s brother Adam, a beat boxer who provides percussion sounds with just his mouth and vocal chords.

Chris departed Home Free last year in pursuit of a solo career, opening a spot for Chance.

With their voices their only instrument, great care is taken to keep them in optimum condition.

“Hydrating always helps; plenty of water, hot teas and coffee,” says Brown of Home Free’s pre-show routine. “We always take the time to warm up before performing.”

Home Free is nearing 100 million views on YouTube, has guested on Kenny Rogers’ latest Christmas album, and has attained the ultimate dream of any bonafide country music act: performing on Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry stage.

“The feeling you get standing on the Opry stage is so unlike any other,” marvels Brown. “We were overwhelmed by the audience’s response and so honoured to be among country royalty.”

Ahead for Home Free is a new studio album, scheduled for release late this year, and a hectic performance schedule that includes a major U.S. tour in the fall.

VIDEO: CMA 2014 Single of the Year Nominee Mash-Up – Home Free

For its Musicfest appearance, sponsored by Ashburnham Realty, Home Free will serve up equal helpings of original songs and covers of popular songs.

Peterborough Musicfest is presenting 17 free-admission concerts featuring a total of 22 acts during its 31st season — each staged every Wednesday and Saturday night until August 26th.

Overseen by general manager Tracey Randall and staff, a board of directors, and numerous volunteers, Peterborough Musicfest’s stated mission is to “provide diverse, affordable live music to enrich cultural and economic prosperity in our community.”

For more information on this concert and/or the 2017 season, visit www.ptbomusicfest.ca or phone the Peterborough Musicfest office at 705-755-1111.

While it’s widely heralded that a picture is worth a thousand words, Dan Misener is here to tell us words can paint a picture that’s equal parts revealing, liberating, and powerful — and sometimes quite funny.

Since 2007, live storytelling event Grownups Read Things They Wrote As Kids, which Misener created, hosts, and co-produces with his wife Jenna, has provided an inspiring forum for Canadians to publicly share the thoughts they committed to paper long ago as children and teenagers — short stories, diary entries, letters, and the like.

At 8 p.m. on Sunday, September 17th at the Market Hall Performing Arts Centre (140 Charlotte Street, Peterborough, 705-749-1146), Misener’s show will be staged in Peterborough for the first time.

Admission is free for those who register in advance to read, but that opportunity is presented on a first-come first-served basis. Audience tickets are $13+HST.

To sign up as a reader or to purchase audience tickets, visit grownupsreadthingstheywroteaskids.com/events/#Peterborough.

“I am consistently surprised at the generosity of the people who sign up to read,” says Misener who, in late 2006 while visiting Jenna’s parents in Kingsville Ontario, stumbled across her diary written in her early teens.

VIDEO: “I’m pretty sure I missed his lips” – Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids

According to Misener, the pair spent the better part of the afternoon reading the entries aloud to each other, laughing and crying. After his own mom sent him some of his schoolwork, Misener booked the Victory Café in Toronto, invited friends, and unwittingly launched what became Grownups Read Things They Wrote As Kids.

“When you dig through your own childhood or teenage writing, it can be a lovely personal experience,” Misener says, “but to get up on stage and share a bit of yourself, that takes guts.

“That’s the part that I’m always surprised at. Not that people have this stuff, but that they are so giving and so open with largely a roomful of strangers.”

According to Misener, those wanting to sharing their written work must meet three criteria: you have to be the one who wrote it, as a kid or adolescent; you have to be one who reads it, as an adult; and it must take five minutes or less to read. Other than those stipulations, the content can be whatever the reader wants to share.

“We’ve had people come and read who are in their twenties and in their nineties and everybody in between,” Misener explains. “We get lots of different types of readers from all kinds of different backgrounds.

“We also get a really wide range of formats. We hear a lot of diaries, a lot of journals, a lot of poetry; we hear schoolwork but we also get to hear less common formats — correspondence or plays or song lyrics and so on.

“The thing that always strikes me is how we also get this wide range of emotions. A lot of what we hear is cute or weird or funny, and some of it is not funny at all. We’ve had people get onstage and be very candid and very open and very personal about really difficult things in their lives growing up.

“We’ve had people talk about domestic abuse, eating disorders, and lots of really difficult things. That’s really what we’re going for. We want to be, as much as we can, a broad representation of what it is to grow up across the country. A lot of that is fun but not all of it.”

Faithful listeners of CBC Radio back in 2014 will already be familiar with Grown Ups Read Things They Wrote As Kids. In the summer of that year, Misener and CBC colleague Alison Broverman toured the country, held live shows, and taped them for airing on the network. In total, 10 episodes were aired.

When CBC opted to not renew the show, Dan and Jenna launched an independent podcast — a return to the original format when the couple first launched the show in 2008 and aired 18 episodes that year. Currently, new episodes are available every couple of weeks, available on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, RadioPublic, SoundCloud, Overcast, Stitcher, Pocket Casts, TuneIn and anywhere else using RSS.

Those looking for any bitterness on Misener’s part in regards to CBC not renewing the show can keep looking.

“The partnership with the CBC was really great,” he recalls. “It has such a broad audience across this country. Of course it was disappointing that our run ended, but the great thing is we live in a time where podcasts exist and you don’t need a broadcast tower to have a show.

“We certainly wouldn’t be where we are today in terms of the audience of the show, or the amount of awareness of the show, without being on CBC.”

Crediting “the amateur archival work of parents” for the abundance of material people have to share, Misener says both the podcast and the live shows see people share writing with universal themes.

“Unrequited love is a pretty common theme no matter where you grew up or who you are. Fighting with your parents, fighting with your siblings, having a teacher you really loved or a teacher you really hated — these kinds of things cut across age and culture.

“We did a show a couple of years ago in Vancouver. We had two readers back to back: a woman who read her teenage diary written in the 1960s and a woman who read her teenage diary written in the 1990s. They were separated by a generation and a half but they could have swapped diaries and you wouldn’t have known the difference.”

While a steady stream of people sharing their writing is vital to the success of each live show, Misener says the audience “is the punctuation mark” and, as such, plays a huge part in each event.

“The act of taking something that was once very private and making it public is, in itself, really the core of our show. We have some of the warmest, most supportive audiences I have ever seen. At our live shows, people laugh but it’s not a comedy show where you have to win people over. Everyone in the audience has already been won over.”

On a personal level, Misener says the reward of Grownups Read Things They Wrote As Kids lies in his interactions with readers prior to each live show.

“We’ve heard so many lovely stories where people thought they had lost their writing and then it appeared in a serendipitous kind of way, or they reconnected with a family member who they had sent a letter to years ago and it managed to find its way back into their hands.

“All these great examples of reconnection with the past, that’s really the hope that I have for anyone who listens to the podcast or comes to a live show … that they have some small moment of reflection about themselves and who they are today and who they used to be.”

AUDIO: Episode 314 – “You stole my electron” (Regina)

Noting that Market Hall was “highly recommended by a number of people who know Peterborough well”, Misener is excited to bring the live show to the city for the first time.

“One of the great joys of getting to do this show is traveling and meeting people. For a place where we’ve not been before, not only do we get this huge backlog of material that hasn’t surfaced but we also get to meet a bunch of people that we haven’t met before.

“That’s really what I look forward to. The first time we do a show anywhere is always special. The hope is we choose places to go where people are willing to do a little bit of digging and find their own material. That’s the only way the show works.”

Cognizant of the fact that most people are nervous over the prospect of getting on stage and sharing their words, Misener makes it a habit of going first to help break the ice and put participants more at ease.

“I would be a hypocrite if I was asking people to do something that I wasn’t myself willing to do,” he says. “So at every show I read a little something that I wrote when I was a kid and Jenna reads some of her childhood and teenage writing.”

Noting “childhood writing is not a renewable resource”, Misener says he and Jenna will keep doing the show “as long as people have material to read. Culturally, I think we’re going to be writing our thoughts and feelings down, whether that’s on paper or digitally, for a very long time to come.”

For more information on Grownups Read Things They Wrote As Kids and to listen to past episodes, visit grownupsreadthingstheywroteaskids.com.

For the fall season of its 20th anniversary year, Market Hall Performing Centre has raised the bar by announcing a diverse range of world-class musical talent coming to Peterborough.

Some of the big acts Market Hall is presenting this fall include roots rock supergroup Blackie and The Rodeo Kings (presented in conjunction with kawarthaNOW.com), blues-rock singer Sass Jordan, root rockers Skydiggers, and a singer-songwriter double header with former Great Big Sea frontman Séan McCann and folk singer Craig Cardiff.

Also coming to Peterborough are soul and R&B singer-songwriter Chloe Charles, Nigerian singer-songwriter Sonia Aimy, Celtic supergroup The Outside Track, Swedish-Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah MacDougall with Ireland’s Tiz McNamara — and more.

Here are the highlights:

Tickets for the newly announced shows go on sale for Market Hall members beginning at 5 p.m. on Thursday, July 20th, and to the general public at 11 a.m. on Monday, July 24th.

Tickets are available by phone at 705-749-1146 or in person at the box office (140 Charlotte Street, 3rd Floor, Peterborough) between 12 to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday, on online anytime at markethall.org. Tickets are also available (cash only) at Moondance (425 George St. N., Peterborough).

In addition to the above concerts presented by Market Hall, other performances this fall include even more music, comedy, dance, theatre, musical theatre, spoken word, and more:

• Play it Forward (Zing, Jazz) – September 9
• Grownups Read Things they Wrote as Kids (talk/comedy) – September 17
• Hong Kong Exile (Dance) – September 21
• Unholy by Diane Flacks (New Stages Theatre) – September 24
• Radical Reels (Film) – September 29
• Evil Dead The Musical (Musical Theatre) – October 18 to 20
• Poetry Festival – October 23 to 28
• Fairytale Circus – November 3 to 5
• Afrobana (Dance/Variety) – November 11
• Catherine MacLellan (Folk) – November 12
• PIGS! A Pink Floyd Tribute (Rock) – November 13
• Accademia Musica Winter Concert – November 25
• The Once (Folk) – December 1
• In From The Cold (Holidays) – December 8 and 9

More shows will be announced soon. Also stay tuned for a brand new website coming soon to markethall.org.

Voodoo Glow Skulls

The Market Hall kicks off its fall season by bringing California ska band Voodoo Glow Skulls to Peterborough on September 13th. Hailing from Los Angeles, the band has sold over a million records and toured their Mexican-infused ska-rock around the globe. This is a rare opportunity to see one of the biggest ska bands in the world perform one of their legendary live shows.

The Outside Track

This all-female Celtic supergroup features members from Ireland, Scotland, Cape Breton, and Vancouver. Fiddle virtuoso Mairi Rankin (of the acclaimed Rankin family) leads the group, along with international renowned harpist Ailie Robertson, flutist Teresa Horgan, and Irish sensation Fiona Black will be performing at the Market Hall on September 19th.

The Creepshow

Led by singer Kenda Legaspi, The Creepshow will bring their rockabilly-infused anthems, filled with huge hooks and backup vocals, to the Market Hall on September 22nd.

Known for their high-energy live shows, The Creepshow won The Edge 102’s best live band award. They are also the first Canadian band ever to be signed to the esteemed California label Hellcat Records.

Rob Tardik

Winner of the best smooth jazz guitarist in Canada, world musician Rob Tardik brings his fusion of flamenco and jazz to the Market Hall on September 23rd.

Tardik has had three U.S. Billboard singles, won top artist at the prestigious 2017 International Acoustic Music Awards, and has more accolades than we can list here.

Chloe Charles

Winner of the John Lennon Songwriting Award, Chloe Charles brings her haunting voice to the Market Hall on October 5th.

Raised in both Berlin and Toronto, Charles’ music knows no boundaries. With critical acclaim from Billboard, Rolling Stone, The Globe and Mail, and CBC, Charles is set to be Canada’s next big singer-songerwriter.

Tim Machin & The Pacifiers

Bring the kids to the Market Hall on October 8th for a sing-a-long with Tim Machin & The Pacifiers.

Winner of Folk Music Ontario’s Best Children’s Song in 2016 for “The Booger Song”, Machin and his group have made a name for themselves by delivering some of the most happy and engaging music a child can experience.

Peter Katz

Voted #1 male vocalist by Toronto’s Now Magazine, Peter Katz bring his lyrical and vocal prowess to the Market Hall on October 14th.

Katz has had no shortage of success in his musical career, with multiple albums debuting at #1 on the iTunes singer-songwriter charts and collaborations with Royal Wood, Glen Hansard, The Good Lovelies, and more.

Blackie & The Rodeo Kings

Consisting of Canadian music icons Colin Linden, Stephen Fearing, and Tom Wilson, Blackie & The Rodeo Kings (BARK) originally formed to record a single tribute album to Peterborough’s own late and great singer-songwriter Willie P. Bennett.

Since then, the trio has grown to become one of the largest roots rock bands in Canada, with eight albums, a Juno award, and international acclaim.

Presented in conjunction with kawarthaNOW.com, BARK will be performing at the Market Hall on October 21st.

Sarah MacDougall with Tiz McNamara

Two-time winner of a Western Canadian Music Award, Sarah MacDougall brings her own brand of indie folk music to the Market Hall on October 22nd.

Born in Sweden, Sarah has transplanted her unique sound to Canada’s Yukon, where she has developed an extensive following throughout Canada and Europe. She is known for blurring the lines between musical genres, incorporating synth pop and strings with her dark folk songs.

Accompanying MacDougall on her fall tour is Ireland’s Tiz McNamara. A fast-rising star in the European folk scene, McNamara has collaborated with the likes of James Bay, Sir Paul McCartney, Shane McGowan, and more.

Sass Jordan

Canada’s Queen of Rock, Sass Jordan has toured with Aerosmith, AC/DC, Van Halen, Styx, Foo Fighters, and more. To date, Jordan has sold over one million albums, and won both Juno and Billboard awards.

This season, Jordan is touring in support of the 25th anniversary of her smash album Racine, which she will be performing its entirety at her Market Hall concert on November 2nd.

Sonia Aimy

With her inimitable, velvety voice, Nigerian-born singer, songwriter, and actress Sonia Aimy is the quintessential embodiment of contemporary African world music.

Aimy has also been recognized in Italy and Nigeria not only for her obvious talent, but also for her commitment to end human trafficking, and for the deep sense of her Nigerian heritage.

She is performing at the Market Hall on November 10th.

Séan McCann and Craig Cardiff

For the first time ever, these two great Canadian singer-songwriters will be performing a double header when they come to the Market Hall on November 17th.

McCann and Cardiff have different approaches to music, but both write on the theme of love. McCann’s songs focus on his struggles with abuse and addiction and his journey to recovery, with a positive message of forgiveness. Cardiff often writes about the human condition, with songs that reveal some of the most vulnerable moments in our lives.

Skydiggers

Performing their unique blend of roots, folk, and rock, Juno award-winning Skydiggers has been a Canadian mainstay since the late 1980s. Best known for their hit single “I Will Give You Everything”, Skydiggers have solidified their place in the Canadian musical landscape as one of the best live bands on the circuit.

They will be performing at the Market Hall in November (date to be confirmed).

Micah Barnes

Jazz returns to the Market Hall on November 30th when Micah Barnes brings his smooth voice and unparalleled talent on the keys to the stage.

Born in Vienna, the Toronto-based Barnes has had two decades of musical success after leading the a cappella group The Nylons throughout the 1990s.

Sultans of String

Canadian world music darlings and three-time Juno nominees, Sultans of String perform a unique blend of world music including jazz, Arabic, folk, East Indian, Celtic, Cuban, and more.

The band will bring their own spin on the holiday season to the Market Hall on November 26th with their “Christmas Caravan” show.

Mudmen

Celebrating their 20th anniversary and over 2,500 performances, Canadian Celtic rock warriors Mudmen will be blowing the roof off of the Market Hall with their high-energy double-barrelled bagpipe show on January 13th.