Ryan Montbleau and Tall Heights concert

A Peabody native, Ryan Montbleau is building a bridge between 70s soul, ragtime, blues-folk-Americana, and the contemporary singer-songwriter vibe of artists like Martin Sexton, David Gray and Ray Lamontagne. Between his solo work and with the Ryan Montbleau Band, he’s racked up eight albums since 2002. ¶ Tall Heights, who will open the show, has just released a full length album, Man of Stone. Ryan Montbleau says “Every once in a blue moon you get blown away by an act you’d previously not heard of. You need to be aware of Tall Heights. What an incredible duo.”

SINGER-GUITARIST-COMPOSER Ryan Montbleau’s musical career has gone something like this: He got an electric guitar when he was 9, switched to acoustic near the end of high school, started writing around the start of college, played — his words — “tons of guitar” there, started singing during his last year in college, formed a band soon after, went into solo acoustic mode, and now fronts the Ryan Montbleau Band, but still does the occasional solo performance. And things have been busy for the Peabody, Mass. native, with a live band album and a studio one, For Higher, along with an often hectic touring schedule.

Montbleau’s love for the guitar and of words really kicked in during his time at Villanova University. “I went into college as a chemical engineering major, but I was writing poetry in the back of chemistry class,” he said, chuckling. “Something wasn’t right.” His first post-college job was working in the box office at House of Blues in Boston. Around that time he did his initial solo acoustic gigs, the first one on the Mashpee Common. Before long he was playing solo sets at House of Blues, as a warmup act. “I did have a band together before that,” he said. “But I wasn’t really ready for it then, so I went solo for a couple of years. Then the band kind of came back together.”

But whether he’s doing shows alone or with the band these days, there’s always plenty of original music to choose from — with a Kinks or a John Sebastian number thrown in now and then. Most shows will have audience members singing along to his best-known song “75 and Sunny.” Ryan’s solo appearances afford listeners the chance to inhabit the acoustic soulful beauty that lies at the hart of the lyrical poetic songs Ryan has been crafting for the last ten years.

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In the summer of 2010, Tim Harrington and Paul Wright were playing for spare change in Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace. Since then, Tall Heights has headlined packed listening rooms across New England, toured down to Austin, TX to showcase at South By Southwest Music Festival, and performed alongside national acts like David Wilcox, Ryan Montbleau, and Andrew Belle. Tall Heights released Rafters, in September 2011, and sold 700 copies in the first 7 days. These five tracks were recorded over a few sweltering months in a small bedroom of their Boston apartment with an SM58 microphone, an iMac, a guitar, a cello and their voices.

With their sophomore release, The Running of the Bulls EP, Tall Heights responded to their fans’ growing hunger to download and relive the enchanting, bottomless ambiance of their live performance. Fittingly so, The Running of the Bulls EP, humble and live, has quickly placed Tall Heights as an ever stronger force on this robust folk scene amongst the nation’s most esteemed new artists. For the duo’s debut full-length effort, Man of Stone, Tall Heights returns to the home studio. The record exists in a fire-lit, shadowy space for their growing army of fans to inhabit. After two powerful EPs, there has been a growing cry for more from these young artists, and Tall Heights delivers with an LP of grand vision and scale.