Adam Sweet

Dear Friends & Fans, I've decided to yank everything up here and move it to Substack: https://adamrsweet.substack.com I hope you can join me there for news and updates on songs, teaching, concerts and community. Best wishes, Adam Sweet

I have a folder of songs that were waiting for a reason to exist. Today they found one. Past the Sky is a new album of songs about space: the missions, the discoveries, and the strange things we keep finding out there. Every song starts with a real story I read in the news and couldn't stop thinking about. It opens with "Come Lift Her Again," written for the Hubble Space Telescope. After thirty-six years of showing us the universe, Hubble is slowly sinking toward the atmosphere, and NASA is asking for ideas on how to boost her back up. I wrote this one right away, while the call was still open. The rest came from my song folder, some of it from last year: • "Old 3I," a late-night jazz ballad for 3I/ATLAS, the interstellar visitor carrying ice older than our Sun • "The Barrier's Been Breached," about the May 2024 solar storm that punched through the Van Allen belt • "Four Minutes," a gypsy jazz tune about two gamma-ray bursts from the same...

This fall I set myself a simple project: write songs about the people, places and discoveries that caught my heart, then send each one to the people it was about. Scientists who untangled the cosmos, firefighters and town staff who showed up on a hard day, land trusts, teachers, historians, a trail builder in Boston, a farmer in Hadley. I didn’t know what to expect. Busy people get a lot of email. But the replies kept coming, from Seattle, Nanjing, Ottawa, Chicago, Lima, Sussex and right here in the Valley. Some were a line or two. Some were long, generous letters. A few made me cry. Here are some of my favorites. “By the time I reached the final verse of the song, I was misty-eyed and choked up in public, and I couldn’t have been happier about it.” — Miles Howard, creator of the Boston Boundless Trail on Boundless “It is really terrific: the music, the lyrics… I can almost guarantee that at some point in the near future we will be singing your song.” — Charles McCr...

When I send a song to the people who inspired it, I often add a promise: if the song ever earns anything, the proceeds go to their work. A $1.50 download won’t change the world, but it can be a small thank-you that keeps giving. Here are the organizations I’ve pledged songs to, and what they said. NEPM, New England Public Media Song: The Hadley Witch “This song is very interesting… We’ll be featuring this story on the show today.” — Monte Belmonte, The Fabulous 413 Kestrel Land Trust Song: Pelham Hills , Westhampton’s Spruce Hill and Spruce Hill Stands “I’m so touched to hear that our work inspired you to create this beautiful music! … a moving reflection of the love of the land.” — Kari Blood, Community Engagement Director Friends of Wildwood Cemetery, Amherst Song: Amherst Swing “This song is so much fun!!!! … We are always looking for donations so your offer is very much appreciated.” — Rebecca, Friends of Wildwood Cemetery City of N...

By Adam Sweet, Granby Buy & Download for $1.50: https://adamsweet.bandcamp.com/track/from-the-welsh-hills Listen on YouTube: https://youtu.be/5C_FghN1egM Long before there were orthopedic surgeons, there were the Sweets. In southern New England, if you broke a bone or threw a hip out of joint, you sent for "Doc Sweet." He had no medical degree. Most days he was a farmer, a carpenter or a blacksmith. But he could set a bone, and so could his father, and so could his grandfather. The family came from Wales. John Sweet was in Salem by about 1630 and moved on to Rhode Island with Roger Williams' people. His son James settled at Ridge Hill, now Shermantown, in North Kingstown, and the bonesetting line runs through him. The skill was passed father to son, along with liniments made from roots and bark. Our family archives say some of that knowledge came from the Narragansett. Some of the stories are hard to beat. During the Revolution, Job Sweet set the bones of French offic...

I wrote a song about it called "Lyman Road".  Buy & Download for $1.50: https://adamsweet.bandcamp.com/track/lyman-road Listen on YouTube: https://youtu.be/p7IsHfBJx-Y It began in 1926 when Smith College President William Allan Neilson established the Smith College Nursery School (alongside a Day School). It opened with about 15 students, many of them children of Smith faculty. Organized as a cooperative school by the Institute for the Coordination of Women’s Interests, it offered educational opportunities for Smith graduate students and became part of the education department in 1928. For years it operated as part of the broader Smith College Campus School (with the preschool program at Fort Hill on Lyman Road and kindergarten–sixth grade at Gill Hall). Full-day options expanded in 1992 with infant/toddler and extended-day programs primarily for Smith faculty and staff. In 2003 these elements were reorganized into the distinct Center for Early Childhood Education. The pr...

  Local stories need local outlets. Finding the door is the hard part. Notes from a Granby songwriter on getting the word out in the Pioneer Valley These days I write songs about real western Mass stories: a Hadley witch, a fire chief on a gray Percheron, a WWI sergeant from my own family, and a freylekhs for Valley Light Opera's Fiddler on the Roof . Songs like these belong in local papers and on local radio. So this fall I set out to tell the people who cover the Valley about them. It has been an education. I want to share what I've learned, with respect for the people on the other end, because I think it helps musicians, small businesses, and the outlets themselves. The newsrooms are stretched thin When I emailed my Fiddler song to local writers and arts contacts, most of the replies were automatic out-of-office notes. I don't take that personally. Western Mass has fewer reporters covering more towns than it did when I started playing out. The people who are left are ju...

  "You can't be mystified by AI. You cannot be terrified by it." Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia Celticado on Stage Nearly every musician I know is afraid of AI. I wrote about that recently, and then Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said it plainer than I could: "You can't be mystified by AI. You cannot be terrified by it. You have to find a way to activate yourself to take advantage of it." He calls this the beginning of a new industrial revolution. Not in the production of energy or food, but the production of intelligence. We've been here before I've played fiddle since 1966. I've watched musicians fear the drum machine, the synthesizer, home recording, MP3s, and streaming. Each time, the players who did best weren't the ones who hid. They learned the new tool, kept what made them human, and got back to work. What AI can't do, and what it can AI won't sit in a kitchen and hear your grandmother's story. It won't know why a tune makes you...

Order by December 10 and the finished song is ready to play on Christmas morning. Running late? Give a gift certificate any time up to December 23, and the song follows in January. A gift nobody else can give them Most presents get used up, worn out, or put in a closet. A song about the people you love gets played at every family gathering for the rest of their lives. Maybe it's your grandfather's war story. The farm your family worked for three generations. Your parents' fifty years together. The aunt everybody quotes at Thanksgiving. Tell me the story and I'll turn it into a real, recorded song with your family's names and places in it. I'm Adam Sweet. I've played fiddle since 1966 and write songs about real people and real places in New England. Hear what I make The Ballad of Sergeant Kielty : my grandfather, a WWI sergeant who carried gassed soldiers to safety in France. The Reluctant Hero of Duxbury : my great-grandfather, who rode a horse bareback into...

  A letter from a dad who uses AI every day My son is almost seventeen. This is what I'd want him to know before he picks a path, and what I wish someone had told me at his age about a world that's changing faster than any of us expected. Dear son, You're going to hear a lot of noise about AI in the next few years. Some people will tell you it's going to take every job. Others will tell you it's a fad. Neither is true, and you deserve better than either story. I use AI every day. It does my research, keeps my paperwork straight, and handles chores that used to eat my evenings. I've watched it get better month by month. So I'm not writing this out of fear. I'm writing it because I've seen up close what it's good at, and that tells me a lot about which jobs are about to get squeezed. Here's the honest truth. If I were 18 today, I'd steer clear of these eight careers, because AI...

The songs, the playing, the late nights in the barn with the band: that's ours, and it stays ours. But the routine work that piles up around the music can be automated, and that's exactly where AI agents earn their keep. Last time I wrote that musicians shouldn't be terrified of AI, and that we need to activate ourselves, as Jensen Huang put it. A few of you wrote back with a fair question: "Fine, Adam, but what do I actually do with it?" This post is the answer. It's a hands-on list of the jobs an AI agent can take off your plate, with real examples of what to ask for. You won't find a word in here about writing songs, making beats, or generating vocals. I don't use AI for that and I'm not recommending you do. This is about the other 60% of a working musician's life: the email, the booking, the paperwork, the uploads, the research and the endless chores. First, what's an "agent"? A chatbot answers questions. An agent does things...

Where bow hair really comes from In 2004 I followed horse tails from a courtyard in Harbin, by train, to the bow hair workshops of Anping. Most players never think about the hair on their bow. I didn't either, until I started selling it. In 2004 I went to China partly on business for Emily's Violins, but mostly to finish something I'd started in Mongolia. I wanted to see where the horses came from, how they were treated, and what happened to the hair between the horse and the bow. Mongolia In Mongolia I went out with a guide to the farms where the horses were being "retired." I didn't know what I'd find. What I saw were healthy horses, gently cared for, eating well and living long lives before the end. That mattered to me, and it still does. Harbin From there I followed the horses back across the border to Harbin, where they were slaughtered and the parts divided up. The tails were left on the bone and washed down with hoses in a cobbled court...

New for Halloween: "The Empty Chair" A slow, minor-key ghost ballad about a verdict read to an empty seat. Download for $1.50 at adamsweet.bandcamp.com . On October 24, 1914, the Atlanta papers ran a story most people would skim past. Georgia's Attorney General, Warren Grice, would stand beside Solicitor Hugh Dorsey to defend the Leo Frank verdict before the state Supreme Court. Frank's new lawyers were arguing that the death sentence was void, because Frank hadn't been in the room when the jury's verdict was read. That detail stopped me cold. A man sentenced to die, and a chair where he should have been sitting. It's the kind of image that sticks with you, and it became my Halloween song. The story behind it In April 1913, thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan went to the National Pencil Company in Atlanta to collect her pay. She was found dead in the factory basement the next morning. The factory superintendent, Leo Frank, was arrested, tried, and...

In 1999, my friend Brian Bender and I packed our fiddle and piano, and flew to Cairo to play music as “Fiddle Hill.” It’s still one of the strangest and best weeks of my musical life. How it happened In the late 90s, Brian and I did a few projects with Michael DiMartino and his Gaia World Music Ensemble. Michael was putting together a world music festival through his connections at the Giza pyramids park, right where the famous light show happens. I’m still not sure how he finagled it, but he did. All our expenses were covered, we stayed in a nice hotel, and for one week our job was simply to play. The 1999 festival program: our klezmer set at 3:00 and Fiddle Hill at 4:00 on December 6th, both with Brian Bender, Michael DiMartino and me Fiddle Hill, with the Sphinx photobombing Leaving the hotel Celtic and klezmer under the pyramids We played a mix of Celtic and klezmer music. Irish reels and Jewi...