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Ralston & Friends

Discover the art and science behind achieving natural colors from onion skins, avocado pits, turmeric, and more.

UMPHREY’S McGEE

by David Fricke

Singer-guitarist Brendan Bayliss had just landed in Los Angeles after a flight from Chicago, expecting to start a West Coast tour with Umphrey's McGee, when he found a text on his phone. It basically said, "You're going home."

Keyboard player Joel Cummins, who lives in L.A., was in San Diego, squeezing in some golf before the shows, when his phone lit up. And guitarist Jake Cinninger was at his home studio in Niles, Michigan – across the state line from the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, birthplace of Umphrey's McGee – about to leave for the airport when he got the news.

It was March, 2020 – the first shock and whiplash of pandemic lockdown. After 22 years on the road and a dozen ambitious and eclectic studio albums, including the 2004 breakthrough Anchor Drops, 2009's prog-rock trip Mantis and 2015's The London Session, recorded in a single day at Abbey Road, Umphrey's McGee – Bayliss, Cummins, Cinninger, bassist Ryan Stasik, drummer Kris Myers and percussionist Andy Farag – were grounded until further notice.

"I remember almost vibrating, like an anxiety attack," Cinninger says now. "We were always in motion, going forward. It's weird when that stops on a dime." Cummins sat in his house, "just beside myself," he says, "because I didn't know when I would play music with my friends again."

"Everyone was guilty of taking a couple of weeks, just staring at the sky," Bayliss says. "Then you run out of excuses to not do anything." Emails flew back and forth "with ideas and chord progressions" as Bayliss, stuck at home, worked on lyrics for a pair of songs already underway: "Always October," an anxious meditation with a jolting chorus, started at a Nashville session in the fall of 2019; and the helplessness in "I Don't Know What I Want," a combined reflection on solitary confinement and heavy, personal loss. In June, 2019, Bayliss' friend Jeff Austin, the former mandolinist in Yonder Mountain String Band, died unexpectedly. "I'm only looking for an antidote," Bayliss wrote in the song. "What if I'm only asking for a friend?"

"I was thinking about a friend that I couldn't help," he admits, adding, "There's something to be said for speaking your mind. If it's a true emotion, it's something everyone can feel: 'Why is this happening to me?'"

Make a stunning floral bouquet featuring dahlias.

Enjoy a stunning assortment of dahlia flowers.

Enjoy a stunning assortment of dahlia flowers.

Grand Rapids Ballet

A 14-time Grammy winner and Billboard Century Award recipient, Emmylou Harris’ contribution as a singer and songwriter spans 40 years. She has recorded more than 25 albums and has lent her talents to countless fellow artists’ recordings. In recognition of her remarkable career, Harris was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2008 and earned a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award in 2018.

Harris is known as much for her eloquently straightforward songwriting as for her incomparably expressive singing. Admired through her career for her talent as an artist and song connoisseur, Harris shook up country radio in the 1970s, and established herself as the premiere songwriter of a generation selling more than 15 million records and garnering 14 Grammy Awards, three CMA Awards, and four Americana Awards.

Harris is one of the most admired and influential women in music. She has recorded with such diverse artists as Linda Ronstadt, Daniel Lanois, Bob Dylan, Mark Knopfler, Neil Young, Gram Parsons, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Roy Orbison, Ryan Adams, Beck, Elvis Costello, Johnny Cash, Lucinda Williams, Lyle Lovett and Rodney Crowell. Few artists have achieved such honesty or have revealed such maturity in their writing. Forty years into her career, Harris continues to share the hard-earned wisdom that—hopefully if not inevitably—comes with getting older, though she’s never stopped looking ahead.

A longtime social activist, Harris has lent her voice to many causes. Most passionately to animal welfare. In 2004 she established Bonaparte's Retreat with the goal of rescuing shelter dogs and adopting them into forever homes. To this day, Bonaparte's Retreat continues to save dogs most in need at Metro Nashville Animal Care and Control and at municipal shelters in surrounding counties.

With hits like “Passionate Kisses” and “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her,” Mary Chapin Carpenter has won five Grammy Awards (with 16 nominations), two CMA awards, two Academy of Country Music awards and is one of only fifteen female members of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. Over the course of her acclaimed career, Carpenter has sold over 16 million records. In 2020, Carpenter recorded two albums - “The Dirt And The Stars,” released in August 2020, and “One Night Lonely,” recorded live without an audience at the legendary Filene Center at Wolf Trap in Virginia during the COVID-19 shut down, and nominated for “Best Folk Album” at the 64th Grammy Awards in 2022.

Of the new album “The Dirt And The Stars,” produced by Ethan Johns (Ray LaMontagne, Paul McCartney, Kings of Leon) and recorded entirely live at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Bath in southwest England, Carpenter quotes the writer Margaret Renkl, “ ‘We are all in the process of becoming.’ That doesn’t stop at a certain age. To be always a student of art and music and life, as she says, that, to me, is what makes life worth living. The songs are very personal and they’re difficult in some ways, and definitely come from places of pain and self-illumination, but also places of joy, discovery and the rewards of self- knowledge. They arrived from looking outward as much as inward, speaking to life changes, growing older, politics, compassion, #metoo, heartbreak, empathy, the power of memory, time and place. There are many themes, but they all come back to that initial truth that we are all constantly ‘becoming’ through art and expression.”

Join us for Special Family Weekends at the Farm Garden!

In this talk we will explore the entwined forces of disability, race, and colonialism in the life and work of Yinka Shonibare.