People’s Songs: A Spillian Questing Residency Gathering
Together with Carsie Blanton and a group of extraordinary singers, songwriters, and activists, Spillian welcomes you into a night that celebrates a radical past and sings open a revolutionary future.
This free concert is the public sharing that follows our first Questing Residency: a place for invited creators to rest, revel, and return bearing gifts, shaped through days of shared care, imagination, and co-creation.
About the Imaginarium Series
Step sideways into another world. Here, imagination has gravity. The ordinary tilts just enough to let the marvelous through. Each Imaginarium gathering is a living moment in our new expanding universe of SpillianQuest: intimate circles of co-conspirators who weave the reveling together on an enchanted historic estate.
And each Imaginarium is its own quest: a small act of rebellion against the rush of the everyday, a chance to revel in the delight of co-creation. And somehow, in that shared play, something genuine takes root: connection, belonging, a touch of wonder. Come as you are and let’s play together.
SpillianQuest: reveling fuel for people yearning to make meaning.
A mycelial web of tools, toys, treats, adventures & boon companions.
People’s Songs: A Gathering Canceled
A revolutionary bit of reveling.
7 PM Saturday, January 10
We’re so sorry for the disappointment.
Due to an unexpected personal emergency, we need to cancel the People’s Songs concert.
Please join our email list by clicking on the red button above and we’ll be in touch when we’re able to reschedule!
Sing on.
The Spillian Crew
Join artists Carsie Blanton, Devon Sproule, Mathias Kom, Brittany Ann Tranbaugh, and Joe Plowman in a celebration of songs, hope, social justice in an informal musical sharing.
You’ll hear songs being written right now; music shaped through collaboration, risk, and shared attention, offered at the moment it begins to belong beyond the people who made it. People’s Songs carries forward a lineage rooted in folk music as a tool for collective life, reimagined for this moment and the work ahead.
A public sharing from Spillian’s first Questing Residency, a five-day creative retreat fully underwritten and supported by Spillian.
A quest awaits before you arrive. Details when you book.
Tickets are limited. Small gatherings can fill quickly.
Meet the Artists
Carsie Blanton
Carsie Blanton is a songwriter with hooks, chutzpah, and revolutionary optimism. Inspired by artist-activists including Nina Simone and Woody Guthrie, her catalog careens through American popular song from folk and swing to pop-punk protest anthems. With a unique mix of humor, political wit, and fifteen-plus years on the road, Blanton has amassed a dedicated fan base and a small menagerie of viral hits (Rich People, Ugly Nasty Commie Bitch, Fishin’ With You).
Devon Sproule
Devon Sproule (she/her) is a songwriter and teacher living in Charlottesville, VA. She was raised on eco-villages in rural Ontario and Virginia. In her rock ’n’ roll touring days, she did stuff like touring pregnant in Australia and collaborating with African musicians in Kenya. Now she’s mostly home, writing songs, teaching music, studying socialism & revolution, and hanging out with her partner & daughter. She can tie her shoes really fast and her loving friends call her style of dressing “Space Granny.”
Mathias Kom
Mathias Kom is a songwriter based in the woods of Epekwitk (Prince Edward Island). With his partner, visual artist and multi-instrumentalist Ariel Sharratt, he writes and performs as The Burning Hell and collaborates with artists around the world. His densely populated, genre-shifting songs draw on literary, historical, and pop-cultural sources, moving with heavy rhyme and a light step. Often circling themes of apocalypse and ruin, his work celebrates participation in a mutually created, ever-surprising, and occasionally beautiful world.
Brittany Ann Tranbaugh
Brittany Ann Tranbaugh is a Philadelphia-based songwriter whose queer Americana heartbreaker “Kiss You” won Song of the Year in the 2021 John Lennon Songwriting Contest. She has been writing songs and playing shows since her teens, and in 2023 left her office job to pursue music full time. Since then, Brittany Ann has released an EP and several singles, played over 300 shows, won first place in the Songwriter Serenade contest in Texas, and toured extensively supporting Carsie Blanton. Her next project is a full-length album, funded by more than 400 fans and expected in late 2026.
Joe Plowman
Bassist and Philadelphia native Joe Plowman performs everywhere from New York to Los Angeles. As music director and bassist for Carsie Blanton, he has headlined shows across the U.S. and Europe and opened for artists including Paul Simon, The Wood Brothers, Madeleine Peyroux, Joan Osborne, and Rufus Wainwright. Joe also tours internationally with jazz band Chelsea Reed and the Fair Weather Five and with jazz singer-instrumentalist Hailey Brinnel. At home in Philadelphia, he performs regularly with jazz greats such as Marty Grosz, Warren Vache, Larry McKenna, and Danny Tobias.
Why We Gather
Lineage, Carried Forward
People’s Songs takes its name from the organization founded in 1945 by Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Alan Lomax, Lee Hays, and others—artists who understood songs as communal tools, shaped through use and shared freely among people. That lineage continues here through new voices, new songs, and new commitments.
The Catskills hold this history deeply. Pete Seeger lived here for many years. Woody Guthrie spent time here. Music shaped by work, resistance, humor, and care has long moved through this landscape. This residency carries that current forward through present-day collaboration and play. People’s Songs is about music as a living force—for gathering people, carrying courage, and opening space for joy, rebellion, and shared possibility.
Beginnings that carry weight.
Moments when something new is entering the world—songs, collaborations, shared commitments. Being present at a beginning holds a particular kind of power.
Music that does real work.
Songs shaped for gathering people, steadying courage, and carrying meaning into public life. Music as companion, spark, and sustaining force.
Reveling as resistance.
Joy chosen on purpose. Laughter, beauty, and pleasure held as serious acts in a world that benefits from exhaustion and despair.
Frivoling with intent.
Play, wit, and delight as ways of loosening what has grown rigid. A reminder that imagination stays alive through pleasure, humor, and shared delight.
Rebellion with a warm heart.
Creative defiance that refuses numbness. Songs that stand up gently and persistently for human dignity, care for the world, and one another.
Witnessing creation as it happens.
New songs heard in their first public breaths. Voices finding harmony. Work still warm from its making.
Shared purpose in the room.
Artists and listeners gathered around care, courage, and the belief that creative work shapes how people live together.
Lineage made present.
Folk music as a living current—songs of work, resistance, humor, and hope carried forward through new voices in this place, at this time.
An invitation into SpillianQuest.
Reveling, questing, frivoling, and rebelling braided together. Meaning-making shared face to face. A glimpse into how imagination becomes lived experience and travels outward from here.
