Manila Folders

Lost Dog Street Band

Four or five years ago I stumbled across Lost Dog Street Band, and while I may have immediately fell in love with their music, I hadn’t anticipated just how it would come to affect me. One of the first songs I listened to of theirs was Loneliness Makes Me Happy off of their 2011 record titled Sick Pup. The song came to me at a very unique point of my life, one where I felt engulfed in loneliness and found myself coming to terms with it.

“Lost Dog Street Band formed in the winter of 2010 after husband-and-wife duo Benjamin Tod (guitarist/vocalist) and Ashley Mae (fiddle player) parted ways with former musical project Barefoot Surrender. Originally conceived as a duet, Benjamin and Ashley quickly dedicated themselves to carrying the tradition of the American troubadour – hopping trains and hitchhiking across country while delivering their unique brand of original songwriting and tragic storytelling.” —Lost Dog’s Website

This past Wednesday I had the privilege to watch them perform at the Mercury Lounge in New York City. While this show wasn’t grandiose or over the top, I mark it as one of my favorites to date. These songs which normally carry such heavy weight seemed to float as damn near every person in the audience recited each and every lyric. It wasn’t until after the show that I thought back to the countless videos I’ve watched of Ben and Ashley. I wasn’t thinking back on the videos themselves, but rather the endless positive comments I’ve read on those videos. Ben, Ashley, and the audience reminded me that the weight isn’t always ours to bear alone.

In gathering videos for this post, I came across a video of the perfomance on Wednesday. So I’ll kick things off with that, but then all of the following videos are ordered chronologically based on when they were uploaded to YouTube. If you only have time for a few videos, my favorites are Nobody’s Baby Now, Terrible & True, Using Again, and Ballad of a Broken Man.