Watchhouse (formerly Mandolin Orange) and Punch Brothers play the song "Elzic's Farewell" live in concert at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, California on August 5, 2022. Elzic's Farewell is a traditional 19th Century tune and has been covered by Yonder Mountain String Band, Old Crow Medicine Show, Mike Marshall, Blue Highway, Väsen, and Norman Blake.

Watchhouse is a folk duo from Chapel Hill, North Carolina consisting of Emily Frantz and Andrew Marlin. Punch Brothers are a Grammy Award winning progressive bluegrass band consisting of Chris Thile (lead vocals, mandolin), Chris Eldridge (guitar), Gabe Witcher (fiddle), Noam Pikelny (banjo), and Paul Kowert (bass). Joining Watchhouse and Punch Brothers onstage were Sarah Jarosz (guitar), Nathaniel Smith (cello), Clint Mullican (bass), and Josh Oliver (guitar).

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American Acoustic live tour dates (2022):

July 27 - Bonner, MT @ KettleHouse Amphitheater
July 28 - Salt Lake City, UT @ Red Butte Garden Amphitheatre
July 31 - Portland, OR @ Pioneer Courthouse Square
Aug. 1 - Seattle, WA @ Woodland Park Zoo Amphitheatre
Aug. 3 - Jacksonville, OR @ Britt Festival Fairgrounds
Aug. 5 - Saratoga, CA @ Mountain Winery
Aug. 6 - Rohnert Park, CA @ Green Music Center
Aug. 7 - Los Angeles, CA @ Ford Amphitheatre
Aug. 17 - Northampton, MA @ Pines Theater
Aug. 18 - New Haven, CT@ Westville Music Bowl
Aug. 19 - Upper Salford Township, PA @ Philadelphia Folk Festival

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Watchhouse official bio:

By the time 2019 came to its fitful end, Andrew Marlin knew he was tired of touring. He was grateful, of course, for the ascendancy of Mandolin Orange, the duo he’d cofounded in North Carolina with fiddler Emily Frantz a decade earlier. With time, they had become new flagbearers of the contemporary folk world, sweetly singing soft songs about the hardest parts of our lives, both as people and as a people. Their rise—particularly crowds that grew first to fill small dives, then the Ryman, then amphitheaters the size of Red Rocks—humbled Emily and Andrew, who became parents to Ruby late in 2018. They’d made a life of this.

Still, every night, Andrew especially was paid to relive a lifetime of grievances and griefs onstage. After 2019’s Tides of a Teardrop, a tender accounting of his mother’s early death, the process became evermore arduous, even exhausting. What’s more, those tunes—and the band’s entire catalogue, really—conflicted with the name Mandolin Orange, an early-20s holdover that never quite comported with the music they made. Nightly soundchecks, at least, provided temporary relief, as the band worked through a batch of guarded but hopeful songs written just after Ruby’s birth. They offered a new way to think about an established act.

Those tunes are now Watchhouse, which would have been Mandolin Orange’s sixth album but is instead their first also under the name Watchhouse, a moniker inspired by Marlin’s place of childhood solace. The name, like the new record itself, represents their reinvention as a band at the regenerative edges of subtly experimental folk-rock.

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Punch Brothers official bio:

Punch Brothers are mandolinist Chris Thile, guitarist Chris Eldridge, bassist Paul Kowert, banjoist Noam Pikelny, and violinist Gabe Witcher. Their accolades include a Grammy for best folk album for their 2018 release All Ashore.

In November of 2020, when the world felt so full of uncertainty, Punch Brothers did one thing that they could rely on: they stood in a circle, facing one another, and made music together. A weeklong recording session, after quarantining and little rehearsal outside of a few Zoom calls, had culminated in their new record, Hell on Church Street—a reimagining of Bluegrass great Tony Rice’s landmark album, Church Street Blues—out on Nonesuch in January 2022.

This band of virtuosi had spent more than a decade changing the face of acoustic music, stretching the limitations of instruments, and influencing a generation of young musicians—but life has a way of keeping a band from getting in the same room. Thile elaborates that “these sessions were a reminder for me of what’s really important. I felt silly having this band take up so little of my creative year; it reminded me that us five together is critical to my happiness.”

Punch Brothers formed in 2006. Its first Nonesuch record, Punch, was released in 2008 and combined elements of the band’s many musical interests. In 2009, they began a residency at NYC’s intimate Lower East Side club The Living Room, trying out new songs and ultimately spawning Antifogmatic (2010). In 2012, the band released Who’s Feeling Young Now?, which Q praised for its ‘astonishing, envelope-pushing vision’, while Rolling Stone said, “The acoustic framework dazzles–wild virtuosity used for more than just virtuosity.” Their 2015 album, the T Bone Burnett-produced, The Phosphorescent Blues, addresses with straight-up poignancy and subversive humor, the power and the pitfalls of our super-connected world.