Reading Native Carving His Place in the Music World

Mark Erelli has been quite active lately.

On Dec. 16, he will be performing with Lori McKenna, Jake Armerding and Zack Hickman at Club Passim in Cambridge.

The Reading native and multi-talented musician has opened for Ray Lamontagne and Lori McKenna; his band Barnstar! released its debut album, C’Mon!, with the help of the Club Passim Iguana Music Fund. On top of these important achievements, he’s been raising his two young sons. 

But don’t let these achievements fool you, Erelli is not easily pigeonholed as merely a career musician. With a degree in Evolutionary Biology from UMass Amherst, he could have led a very different life. Despite this, Erelli has no plans switch careers. 

“I don’t think I’m quite eligible for any employment like that at this point,” he said during a telephone interview. “Whether by training or by inclination, I think I’m in [the music game] for the long haul.”

Reading Roots

During his youth in Reading, Erelli was passionately involved in the musical theatre program directed by local arts teacher Bill Endslow—now Fine and Performing Arts Department Chair at —whom he found very encouraging regarding his abilities as a performer. 

“I was very fortunate to come from a town that valued arts and had arts as part of its regular curriculum at public school,” Erelli explained gratefully. 

He performed in many theatre classics such as Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Bye Bye Birdie, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. He recalled his time in musical theatre fondly. “Great times,” said Erelli. “Not only was it my first experience singing, it was my first experience on stage and performing, and that was an equally important experience for becoming a professional musician.” 

Of all the roles he filled in his time working with Endslow in the RMHS musical theatre program, he feels that Bye Bye Birdie gave him his first real opportunity to shine. He described his character as Elvis-like, and feels that in some ways he is still playing that role. 

“I was really given license to go nuts on the singing and the dancing,” he recalled. “It was a very compelling character for a somewhat introverted high school kid to get up on stage and be free to kind of act out this rock star vibe, it was a high point.” 

Erelli was grateful for this experience, and feels it contributes to his role as a performer to this day. 

A Hobby Becomes a Career

Despite his early interest, Erelli can’t pinpoint a moment when music became more than an artistic release for him.

“I’m very fortunate and I’m not sure if I’ll ever feel like I’ve got it established,” he explains, “I’m always just trying to figure out how to rededicate myself to it every day.”

Through his work with Barnstar!, he is finding an outlet for that rededication in his evolving role in the band. 

“I’ve learned that I can’t stand off to the side and play the blazing fast acoustic guitar solos; that I have to go with my strength, and that’s singing," Erelli said. “I’ve kind of evolved into one of the lead singers in the band.” 

Barnstar! is a local bluegrass band with a strong focus on the singing and songwriting aspects of the music, diverging from the genre’s traditional focus on instrumentalism. 

“Up until this point [Barnstar!] has been an almost quasi-imaginary band because everybody is so busy with other projects, but now that the record exists it feels more official,” explained Erelli, “we’re starting to get people who show up at concerts that actually know what we do, and it’s starting to feel pretty much like a real band.”

Despite the burgeoning success of his band, Erelli has not lost sight of his own career as a singer and songwriter and plans to continue to make his own music in the future. He has released a solo record nearly every year since 1999, and he feels that it is time to slow down a bit. 

“I’m just waiting for the material to come find me and then it will be time to make a new record,” he said. “Maybe that will be next year, I hope it will be, and if not then we’ll be looking at the year after that.”

Show Tonight at Club Passim

His upcoming performance at Club Passim in Cambridge will be a break from the pressures of being a singer songwriter. An annual event for the last eight years, Under the Covers is a collaborative effort between Erelli and his friends in which they endeavor to create original covers of both popular and obscure music by musicians they respect. 

“We’re all singer songwriters, but the choices range from all over the place. We’ve done everything from Michael Jackson to Jackson Browne, I think someone covered a rap song one year, I think Lori covered Rihanna one year, it goes all over the place,” Erelli said of the traditionally eclectic set-lists. “This year is no exception, but I don’t want to give away any of the material. It’s meant to be a surprising kind of entertaining show.”

When asked to explain what newcomers to the event should expect, Erelli was quick to respond that “they should expect the unexpected.” The goal for the foursome of musician friends, is to “try and do obscure things, and shine a light on them. We also do more well known things in a very different musical context than people may know them, and see how long it takes for them to recognize the tunes.”

With so much going on for him, you may expect that Erelli has little time for his personal life. Though it is difficult, he has made home life his priority. 

“That’s the best gig I have, I wouldn’t trade that for the world,” He said.  “It makes everything a little more challenging as far as just logistics and energy and whatnot, but it also makes everything much more rewarding. It gives me a sense of purpose that I’m not sure that I knew existed before.”