Folkadelphia Session: John Reilly and Friends

Welcome to 2016 and to your first brand new Folkadelphia Session for the year. If you’re just tuning in to what we do, each week on Folkadelphia Radio (that’s Wednesday nights 10-11 PM), we premiere a recorded performance, tracked live at the WXPN Performance Studio, with artists that fit under that big old umbrella that we call Folk Music. To get a quick primer on what we have to offer you, check out the totally free and totally awesome (if I do say so myself) Best of 2015 compilation, available right here.

Today, we present a session that we were dying to record and even more excited to share with listeners – John Reilly and Friends. You likely have seen John C. Reilly’s presence on-screen, as a star actor and comedian, but perhaps you didn’t know he was also a fantastically accomplished musician as well. Multiple sides of his creativity met when in 2007 Reilly starred and sang in the parody Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, riffing off the Johnny Cash and Ray Charles biopics. Recently, Reilly has been collaborating with a crew of musicians that includes Tom Brosseau, Becky Stark (of Lavender Diamond), and Sebastian Shaw. The quartet harmonized and mesmerized with their renditions of a few traditional tunes, including the Carter Family’s “Single Girl, Married Girl.” The excellent in-studio session begs two questions: what is John C. Reilly not good at and when can we expect a full album?