Driftwood Plays the Bluff This Week — and *December Last Call* Is Why You Should Show Up Early

The best-kept secret about upstate Americana is that some of its most durable songwriting comes out of Binghamton, an hour southeast of the vineyards, from a band that has been grinding the roots circuit for two decades. Driftwood opens for the Infamous Stringdusters at Point of the Bluff Vineyards on July 17, and it is a genuine mistake to treat them as an undercard.

The record to know is December Last Call, Driftwood's sixth album, released March 22, 2024. It is a reflective, road-worn set — nine songs, about 40 minutes — that trades some of the band's earlier bluegrass sprint for a fuller, more considered roots-rock sound. Grateful Web flagged the album on announcement; Glide Magazine called it a display of "effortless roots rock charm"; Americana Highways, in a March 2024 interview feature, framed it as a band returning to its upstate New York roots after a stretch apart, reorienting around the friendships that built it. That last part matters, because you can hear it in the record — the sound of people who almost stopped and chose not to.

Live, Driftwood is a different animal than the album suggests. Fiddle, guitar, and standup bass lock into the kind of foot-stomp that made them festival regulars — they're longtime Finger Lakes GrassRoots faces — and the harmonies get rowdier than any studio take. On a vineyard stage above Keuka, opening for a band as instrumentally precise as the Stringdusters, expect them to swing for the fences early and dare the sunset to keep up.

Why write about a two-year-old album now? Because December Last Call is still the clearest statement of who this band is, and because the live date is the point. Regional Americana doesn't survive on streams; it survives on exactly this — a working band from Binghamton pulling into Hammondsport, playing to a wine-country crowd that mostly came for the headliner, and converting a few dozen of them by the third song. That's the actual economy of a scene like this one, one show at a time.

Get there for the opener. That's the whole advice.

Sources: Driftwood Announces New Album December Last Call Out March 22 (Grateful Web); Driftwood Deliver Effortless Roots Rock Charm on December Last Call (Glide Magazine); Concerts at Point of the Bluff — Lineup