Switchback

JOHNSON CITY (Sept. 21, 2018) – In their more than 25 years together, Martin McCormack and Brian FitzGerald, known as the duo Switchback, have traversed continents and played in many configurations and diverse venues, including on PBS and Chicago Soundstage, for TV shows such as “Grimm” and at FitzGerald’s well-known family nightspot in Berwyn, Illinois. Sometimes they perform their unique blend of American roots and Celtic music exclusively on acoustic guitar and mandolin as a twosome.  Often, fellow musicians add fiddle, keyboards, drums and electric instruments.

In Johnson City on Friday, Sept. 28, at 7:30 p.m., McCormack and FitzGerald, as an acoustic duo, will make their stage at First Presbyterian Church, 105 S. Boone St., for “An Evening with Switchback.” The performance is sponsored by Mary B. Martin School of the Arts at East Tennessee State University.

Switchback’s harmonies have been compared with that of the Everly and Louvin brothers and Simon and Garfunkel, and FitzGerald’s guitar and mandolin playing termed “whirlwind and soulful” by Performing Songwriter.

Sharing the live music experience with as many people as possible is integral to Switchback’s mission. There is no venue or audience to which Switchback won’t play. Prisons, retirement homes, juvenile facilities, special needs homes – all have shared in what McCormack calls the “religious” or “magical” experience of a live performance.

“That kind of excitement and energy and that magic of being live – as a shared experience – it’s unlike any other kind of art form,” says McCormack, who, like FitzGerald, is from the Chicago area. “It’s so spontaneous.”

Switchback’s shows feed off the audience, he says. “Somebody that comes that evening (in Johnson City) is going to have different styles of music and stories from the road. We work off the energy of the audience and whatever direction the audience is telling us to go.

“We don’t have just one formula to give people, so what’s going to happen in Johnson City is so different from what will happen in any other place. The audience is much invested in it. It’s a wonderful experience. It’s one of the last real spaces that we have for that kind of magic to appear.”

Switchback’s very personal style of performance will fit nicely at First Presbyterian Church, according to Anita DeAngelis, director of the Martin School of the Arts. “Seeing these artists in a more intimate setting,” she says, “will be interesting and powerful in its own way and very different from a larger concert setting.”

Switchback draws from such genres as bluegrass, Celtic, country, rock, blues and jazz. Writing new songs, even if they are sometimes reminiscent of older styles, has been a mainstay and motivator for McCormack and FitzGerald since they got together in the 1990s. Between the two of them, they have written more than 300 Americana tunes, in varying styles.

“We have a lot of songs that are fan favorites, but Brian and I are always trying to look forward and think about what are we working on right now that gets us excited,” McCormack says.

Expanding boundaries further, they wrote a mass, “A Hibernian Mass,” and scored a piece to be performed with orchestra and choir titled “Falling Water River,” which premiered at the Grand Opera House in Dubuque, Iowa, in 2012. In addition to the duo’s waygoodmusic.com website, Switchback also features its sacred music at jubilationmusic.net.

“I marvel at some musicians who say, ‘I’m an Irish musician and that’s what I’m going to be till the day I die,’ and I have a lot of respect for that,” McCormack says, paying respect to their Irish-American roots. “I would just find that extremely limiting to say I was just going to be a country songwriter or a jazz musician. I want to try it all and I think we have done that on our own terms.”

Whatever the style of new or more traditional tune, Switchback “hits an everybody note,” says Marc Smith, author and creator of the National Poetry Slam. That’s the plan, says McCormack.

“We just feel that maybe that is why the universe or faith or God has put us on this planet,” McCormack says. “Because – using the whole notion of a ‘switchback,’ a slow winding road up a mountain – we are slowly going back and forth and reaching all those different people, that community, the people that are in desperate need of live music. That’s really what we want to do. It is important to us and it’s very fulfilling.