Raising Daughters, Josette Axne and Hallie Riddick (Provided photo by Naj Wikoff)

When I was a kid, the “shoulder season” lasted nine months interrupted by winter weekends when skiers arrived to hit the slopes of Whiteface and Whitney, and in the fall, for those who had professional guides in the family as we did, by hunters seeking the wily deer.

Today, essentially an outcome of the 1980 Winter Olympics and state investment in the venues, shoulder season has dramatically shrunk.

A benefit of fewer visitors is more opportunities for locals to re-connect and hang out together, which for me included spending a night with friends high up at around 3,800 feet in a virgin growth forest with its deep moss glades and pungent balsam smells, and on Saturday evening, Oct. 18, at the Recovery Lounge enjoying “Nashville Comes to the Lounge, Raising Daughters and Robby Hecht.”

The Recovery Lounge, while a great venue year-round, like many is an excellent shoulder season venue, a nice place to relax, watch a concert, play or reading, and connect with friends. Robby Hecht and Josette Axne and Hallie Riddick of Raising Daughters, are country-folk singer-songwriters based in Nashville with Hecht having lived there for about 20 years, Axne and Riddick for about six months.

Josette and Hallie first met in 2019 at the National Theatre Institute’s O’Neill Center, in Waterford, Connecticut; a venue that provides training in a variety of theatrical disciplines, and reunited there about a year later.

Julie Robards and Gabrielle Schutz (Provided photo by Naj Wikoff)

Hallie, whose focus was on directing and writing playwriting hails from Kentucky and Josette, who was on an acting path, from Colorado. At the Institute both took classes is songwriting and ended up collaborating on a wide array of assignments, which included on Hallie’s play “Flush.”

“We were both playing guitar when we were young, so it was always a big part of our lives,” said Josette. “In the songwriting class they encouraged us to collaborate on writing songs and performing them on our guitars, which wasn’t something I had thought of before.”

In 2021, they moved to New York City seeking to get a wide variety of experiences in theater. There they continued to explore performing and writing songs together, and using a wide range of country instruments eventually releasing their first Extended Play record in 2024. Also that year, they attended the Folk Alliance International Festival in Kansas where they showcased their talents in smaller venues. That success, resulted in their first tour in August 2024, that was well received, and helped stimulate their move to Nashville, which included hunkering down two days in a tornado shelter.

“The singer songwriters we met at the Folk Alliance inspired us the do more in our genre,” said Hallie. “We had been thinking about it in New York, but after meeting all these amazing singer-songwriters, all of whom were in Nashville, we decided to make the move.”

Along their artistic journey they met Robby Hecht who urged them to move to Nashville, a center for country-folk songwriters and producers.

“I met them at a conference in Nashville,” said Robby. “They said they were coming to town, and then I waited and waited. To me, it would be odd not being in Nashville as I love being around so many singer songwriters.”

Hecht, who hails from Knoxville, has been a touring singer-songwriter for over two decades, and performed often at the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, is by no means a hard rocker. He comes across more like James Taylor, and, at the Lounge, seemed to spend more time tuning his guitar than singing, an outcome of using a 60-year-old guitar not accustomed to the dry cold air present in Upper Jay. Like Axne and Riddick, Hecht is a good storyteller who, through his banter and songs, quietly but firmly takes one into introspective realms and revelations.

“When we first started writing songs, we wrote separately,” said Josette. “But since we’ve been in Nashville we’ve been writing more collaboratively. As we both tend write about many of the same things, it helped bring us together, which is a bit a what ‘Raising Daughters’ is about.”

“I was into writing plays, but whether is through a play or music, it’s all about storytelling,” said Hallie. “We were writing about coming of age, womanhood, and found we had both very similar and very different tastes; her parents are Deadheads, mine are into Alison Krauss. We bring different experiences to our writing.”

“This is just our second time performing together,” said Robby. “We’re still trying to figure out how best to work together.”

An aspect that members of the audience like Julie Robards praised was their harmony, which was breathtaking. Lovely too was the opportunity for audience members to hang out with the musicians after the performance and chat about music, and suggest places for them to visit while here.

Upcoming at the Recovery Lounge in mid-November is “The Maids,” a play by Jean Genet, that will be performed by Katherine Norman, Jess Kemp and Elyse Sinklier and directed by Gabrielle Schutz. The play, set in late 1940s Paris, is about two sisters who are maids serving a woman, servants trapped in life they never desired nor can leave.

“Throughout the play they swap identities and roleplay overthrowing their madame, their employer,” said Schutz. “At a certain point in the play, the madame comes home and the question becomes, what was fantasy, what was reality, and what now, are we going to act on our fantasies given the opportunity. It’s a bit spooky, a bit dark, it’s fun, it’s a swirl of identities.”

Other upcoming shoulder season events include: Borealis Singers, Evening of Remembrance, Nov 1, Keene Valley Congregational Church; East Branch Friends of the Arts, Nova Scotia Celtic artists Cassie & Maggie, Dec. 10; Keene Arts: Farmers Market Sundays Oct 19 to Dec 21; Keene Fitness Spooky Spin, Costume Contest, and Dance Party, Oct 29; Lake Placid Film Festival Oct. 30 to Nov. 2; Lake Placid Center for the Arts, Opera, Oct. 28, Nov. 8, Dec. 13 and 20; Lake Placid Hall of Fame induction ceremony, Roamers Cafe, Nov. 5.

(Naj Wikoff lives in Keene Valley and has been writing his column for the Lake Placid News since 2005.)