One Guitar, Passed Around: Nathan Page's Underground Guitar Pull Returns to Auntie Mae's

The guitar pull is the oldest good idea in songwriting. A few writers, one circle, no band, no setlist — you play your song, then hand the guitar to the next person and hope yours held up next to theirs. On Thu, Aug 13, that tradition sets up shop in the basement at 616 N 12th, when Manhattan singer-songwriter Nathan Page hosts his Underground Guitar Pull at Auntie Mae's Parlor.

It's a confirmed date on a calendar that's been dependable all summer, and it's a smart bit of programming for the room. Auntie Mae's — the speakeasy-style club that has quietly anchored Manhattan's indie, rock, punk, jazz and Americana life while the bigger stages sat dark for the season — is exactly the kind of low-ceilinged, listening-forward space a guitar pull needs. A song passed around a circle dies in a noisy sports bar; it breathes in a basement where people came to actually hear it. Page, a Manhattan songwriter who curates and hosts the round, is essentially building the format's ideal habitat.

What makes a guitar pull worth leaving the house for — more than a standard opener-headliner bill, honestly — is that it's unrepeatable. The lineup for a songwriter round is fluid by design; who's in the circle on a given night shapes the whole evening, and the between-song talk, the false starts, the "okay this one's new" confessions are half the show. You are watching songs at their most exposed, before the band and the production tidy them up. When it works, it's the most intimate thing live music does.

Here's why a recurring night like this matters more than any single touring stop. Show spotlights usually chase the visitor — the name rolling through town on a Tuesday. But a scene's real health is in its habits: the standing nights, hosted by locals, that give the town's own writers somewhere to test material and find each other. A guitar pull is infrastructure disguised as a hang. It's how a songwriter who played their first tentative round two years ago ends up, a few seasons later, the most assured voice in the circle. Multiply that by a dozen writers and a few years and you've got a songwriting community instead of a scattering of open-mic hopefuls.

Manhattan's midsummer has been honestly quiet on the touring front — The Hat won't stir until September, and the marquees have been elsewhere. But quiet weeks are exactly when a night like this earns its keep. No headliner, no cover-band autopilot, just the town's writers doing the vulnerable, essential work of playing new songs to a room that showed up to listen.

Get there early, grab a spot close, and keep your phone in your pocket. The best line of the night will probably come from someone you've never heard of — and it'll only happen once.

Sources: Auntie Mae's Parlor events