Americana/bluegrass singer-songwriters Chris Brashear and Peter McLaughlin like to finish one-another’s musical sentences.
After three decades of collaborating, that’s to be expected when the pair share a stage.
On Tuesday, Oct. 6, they will reunite for their first COVID-era Tucson concert to open the Rhythm & Roots “Taco Tuesday” concert series at Hotel Congress. The socially-distanced event that will have a limited audience on the historic hotel’s patio will remind us of that time a decade ago when the pair co-headlined a Rhythm & Roots show with the Ronstadt Trio.
“We still have a lot of fun. It’s easy,” Brashear said early this week from his temporary home at the UA’s School of Anthropology Residential Scholar Program digs, an adobe home sitting in the middle of a Hohokam archaeological site that dates to A.D. 1100-1400. “With Peter and I, it’s always been we work at our craft and we just have always had a good camaraderie playing. It seems like it’s always been easy for us.”
This will be Brashear’s first Tucson performance since returning from his Massachusetts home two weeks ago. A veterinarian by day, Brashear is here through December while his wife, University of Massachusetts at Amherst anthropology professor Elizabeth Krause, is a University of Arizona resident scholar.
The couple are no strangers to Tucson; they lived here throughout the 1990s while Krause earned her anthropology doctorate degree at the UA. That’s when Brashear first met McLaughlin.
They have recorded three duets albums including 2017’s ”The Colton House Sessions, Songs for the Southwest,” which came out of the pair’s 2014 songwriting residency with the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff. They and Todd Phillips spent the fellowship writing songs that captured the beauty, history and culture of the Colorado Plateau and Southwest canyon country.
Brashear said that despite the physical distance separating him and McLaughlin, they have continued working together over the years.
“We’ve carved out a niche not only together but we have our own bands, our own careers,” he said, and often they contribute to one another’s solo efforts. “We are never not doing something together even if we are far apart.”
Brashear, who plays mandolin, fiddle and guitar, and McLaughlin, a national flatpicking champion, are working on the followup to “The Colton House Sessions,” which Brashear said they hope to release in December. Some of the new songs on that album will be part of Tuesday’s performance, along with songs from their earlier albums and a couple covers from songwriters like Townes Van Zandt and John Prine.
This will be the pair’s second performance since Brashear returned. The pair played a socially-distanced concert in Flagstaff late last month.
