Jake Armerding
Jake Armerding is a fiddler, mandolin player, guitarist and singer-songwriter from the Boston area who played in his father Taylor Armerding’s bluegrass band Northern Lights through the 1990s before starting a solo career. He was named Best New Artist by the Boston folk station WUMB in 2001, has made a series of his own albums, and plays fiddle in the band Barnstar!
He began sitting in with Northern Lights in 1990, alongside his father, and joined the band full time in 1992. On its Flying Fish album Wrong Highway Blues (1994) he played fiddle and sang harmony, and on Living in the City (Red House, 1996) he sang lead and harmony and played mandolin and fiddle, with bass on several tracks. He left the band in 1999 to work on his own, the year of his first album, Caged Bird. He studied at Wheaton College, where he took a degree in English literature.
His second album, Jake Armerding, came out on Compass Records in 2003, and he followed it with independent releases: Walking on the World (2007), Her (2009), Cosmos in the Chaos (2013) and the collection Your Voice Like Brake Lights (2015). He also formed a duo, the Fretful Porcupine, with the saxophonist Kevin Gosa.
In Barnstar!, a band that billed itself as “bluegrass for people who hate bluegrass,” he plays fiddle and viola and sings, with his father on mandolin; its album Sit Down! Get Up! Get Out! came out on Signature Sounds in 2015. As a sideman he has recorded with Crooked Still (Hop High, 2004, as a harmony singer), Hanneke Cassel, Red Molly (James, 2010, on fiddle and mandolin), Lori McKenna and Sara Groves, and he was one of the musicians who recorded music for the audiobook of Josh Ritter’s novel Bright’s Passage (2012). He has taught on the faculty of the Traditional Music Project at the Real School of Music in Burlington, Massachusetts.
