Hermitage fellow is fixing the world one song at a time

The folk musician Woody Guthrie traveled the U.S. during the Great Depression with a guitar that had a sticker that read, "This machine kills Fascists." Pretty powerful stuff. But Tom Lubben's favorite expression of Guthrie's is: "A folk song is what’s wrong and how to fix it."

The middle brother of the folk-singing triplets The Lubben Brothers, Tom Lubben doesn't endorse the lifestyle choices Guthrie made during his 55-year life, but he supports the idea that folk music can solve problems. 

As Lubben sees it, a big problem right now is division between people. Folk music can help bridge that gap by establishing common ground. With the backing of Key Chorale, Lubben was chosen as a fellow in a program developed by the Hermitage Artist Retreat for artists with ties to local arts groups.

Dubbed the Hermitage Cross Arts Collaborative, the program gives artists the opportunity to work on a project in a beachside bungalow in Englewood. Part of the fellowship includes performing for the community. Lubben is fulfilling his end of the bargain with a sunset concert at Nathan Benderson Park on Wednesday, Dec. 3. 

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The Hermitage Sunsets @ Benderson Park also includes Shawn Allison, who was sponsored for a Hermitage fellowship by the contemporary classical musical group ensembleNewSRQ, often called enSRQ for short. The evening wouldn't be possible without the generosity of the Koski family, notes Hermitage Artist Retreat CEO and Artistic Director Andy Sandberg.

The Lubben Brothers have been performing with Key Chorale since 2022, not long after graduating together from Palm Beach Atlantic University, a Christian college in West Palm Beach. Tom Lubben majored in English while his older brother Michael and his younger brother Joshua both majored in music composition.

Raised in Iowa and home-schooled by their music-loving parents, who also hired music teachers for them, the Lubbens spent three years hunkered down in Minnesota's Great North Woods before attending college. It was there that they developed their unique sound that some have compared to the Lumineers.

It's also where Tom Lubben befriended luthier (musical instrument craftsman) Bob Wenzel, who gave him a violin named "The Magini" that opened the door for Lubben to play fiddle with his brothers in addition to his mainstay, the accordion. 

In a telephone interview, Tom Lubben said he and his brothers ended up working with Key Chorale because he cold e-mailed its artistic director Joseph Caulkins. “I knew they did a lot of cross-genre collaborations, and I thought it would be great to work together. I didn’t hear back right away, but I almost fell off my chair one day when I saw his email saying he was interested," Lubben says. 

As the sun sets over the lake in Benderson Park, Lubben and six members of Key Chorale will perform three classic folk songs with new arrangements that he developed during his stay at the Hermitage on Englewood Beach.

The three songs are Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer,” which became an anthem of the civil rights and anti-war movements in the 1960s, Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A- Changin’” and Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.”

In past collaborations with Key Chorale, The Lubben Brothers have performed multilayered songs by Crosby, Stills and Nash and explored the influence of American troubadours. But for a symphonic chorus such as Key Chorale with more than 100 members to perform songs originally written for banjo and harmonica, dense, new arrangements have to be written.

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That’s how Tom Lubben spent his recent stint at the Hermitage Artist Retreat. “When I look at a song like ‘If I Had a Hammer,’ I don’t want to change it because it’s perfect. So I start with the melody and layer in choir harmonies. There’s lots of opportunities for call-and-response and to add contrapuntal elements,” Lubben says, sounding like the musician that he is.

Asked what the best things were about his time at the Hermitage, Lubben cites “uninterrupted stretches of time” and meeting his fellow Hermitage Fellow Allison. “I got twice as much done as I normally do,” he says.

Lubben won’t be performing it at Benderson Park, but he’s working on a medley of “900 Miles” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” that he’s excited about.

Today, Tom Lubben and brothers live outside Nashville, where they moved to gain more visibility in the music industry. But he feels at home in Sarasota because his wife is from here. Asked where they like to have breakfast, he replies without hesitation: “Yoder’s because they have head-sized cinnamon rolls.”

Lubben tries to eat vegan but late nights spent writing songs and rehearsing can lead to pizza runs at Five-Star Pizza. 

“It’s a chain, but they’re open late and the pizza is really good,” he says.