A year after its release, Pines frontman and his Tucson band playing CD release gig

The Pines founding frontman David Huckfelt is back in his winter refuge in Tucson and on Friday, Jan. 21, he’s going to do something he has been wanting to do here for more than a year.

Huckfelt is getting the band back together, and by band we mean some of the biggest names in the Tucson music scene: Billy Sedlmayr, Howe Gelb, Thøger Lund, Winston Watson, Gabriel Sullivan, Connor Gallaher, Tom Walbank, Jon Villa and Ben Nisbet.

On Friday, they will perform the long-awaited CD release of Huckfelt’s year-old album “Room Enough, Time Enough,” which he recorded with the Tucson musicians at XIXA’s Dust & Stone Recording Studio downtown in January 2020, weeks before the pandemic shut everything down.

“Getting to play with Billy and Howe and Connor and Gabe, I’m really excited about that,” Huckfelt said from a westside home he is renting through March; he’s been a Tucson winter visitor for several years.

Aside from a couple of small solo shows at Monterey Court and the MSA Annex last February, Huckfelt never had the chance to properly introduce “Room Enough” to Tucson. He has played tracks from the record at a handful of shows in the Midwest and Minnesota, where he spends the rest of the year, but he’s never focused a show solely on the record.

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Friday’s show at 191 Toole will include the full band — which Sedlmayr has dubbed the Mother Higgins Children’s Band — performing most if not all of the record. Huckfelt and Sedlmayr also will perform a set of each other’s songs, some of which they included on a live album they recorded in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in November and released on Bandcamp.

Huckfelt met Sedlmayr on one of his first winter sojourns here. Sedlmayr was singing his signature song “Tucson Kills” at Tap & Bottle and once he heard that voice, roughhewn with an underlying vulnerability and sweetness, Huckfelt was mesmerized.

“We became fast friends,” he recalled, saying “there’s a certain kind of effortless magic” to the pair’s friendship that transcends musically. Their voices, Huckfelt said, complement one another, and even when they don’t, there’s a connection that he can’t quite explain.

During that fall trip to the Midwest, Sedlmayr and Huckfelt threaded the needle to this weekend’s show, reaching out to the other musicians and lining up the venue. 191 Toole’s parent Rialto Theatre signed on and KXCI 93.1 FM agreed to promote the show.

As of late last week, only Gelb and Walbank were question marks for Friday’s concert.

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