From a Fan's Poster to 100 Re-Recorded Songs: Reid Genauer Returns to the Shea

Some artists get a birthday card. Reid Genauer got a poster with 100 of his own songs hand-drawn onto it — and it sent him back into the studio for a year.

The Strangefolk and Assembly of Dust frontman brings the band to the Shea Theater on Wednesday, Aug. 5 (doors 7, show 8, all ages), and he arrives mid-project on one of the more charming ideas in recent jam-adjacent memory. A fan gifted Genauer that poster referencing 100 of his tunes; rather than frame it, he decided to re-record every last one, solo and acoustic, releasing them as "This Is What I Saw" in five installments starting in January.

"It was like an audio version of the poster," Genauer told the Greenfield Recorder of the stripped-down sessions. "It's raw, just me and an acoustic guitar."

Live, though, it's no solo hush. The touring Assembly of Dust pairs founding guitarist Jon Leccese and drummer Dave Diamond with newer hands Scott Law on guitar and Michael Borrowski on keys — a full-band engine for songs that spent the winter reduced to their bones.

Genauer, for his part, is a fan of the room. He called the Shea "one of the great historic landmark theaters that are peppered throughout the northeast," adding that playing it "feels like stepping into another era."

That's the pitch, really: a songwriter who just spent a year re-examining his entire catalog, playing it back to you inside a 99-year-old theater that feels like a time machine. Bring the setlist you'd have drawn on your own poster. He may well play it.

Sources: Sounds Local: Reid Genauer at the Shea (Greenfield Recorder); Shea Presents: Reid Genauer and Assembly of Dust