Ryan Alvanos

• Folk
• Singer/Songwriter

“Old Goodies Night”

At Passim, Ryan Alvanos* will observe the 100th birthday of his beloved Gibson K-2 mandocello with a solo performance.

Accompanying himself exclusively on centurion instruments, Rhymin’ Ryan’s vast book of forthcoming songs will welcome his long-dead Sitka spruce to its next hundred years of music.

*Ryan Alvanos is a multi instrumentalist, a Renaissance storyteller, and a Formalist poet. His Famous Last Words* (forthcoming 2019) uses music by the mouthful to make mortality more lively and strange. His first book of lyrics-turned-poems is forthcoming from Pen & Anvil Press 2019.

*To make Famous Last Words, Ryan Alvanos summoned a dozen soulful singers from Boston’s storied music scene to breathe new life into Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters* (fake name). An interred, southern-Illinois citizenry became a scandalous book of Chicago-born, blank verse at time when rhyme was the rule and poetry was a coastal pursuit in America. Famous Last Words turns a piano tuner, a poet, a whore, a fiddler, a teacher, farmers, widows, and Abraham Lincoln’s neighbors into singers and their stories into the stuff of song. Famous Last Words features an otherworldly chorus of voices unearthed from Ryan’s musical ramblings through New England: Dan Blakeslee, Dennis Brennan, Abbie Barrett, Andrea Gillis, James Rohr, Susan Cattaneo, Peter Mulvey, Christian McNeill, Jen Kearney, Vance Gilbert, Danielle Miraglia, and Jenee Halstead.