Photo by Howard Owens.
If you have not heard of Henry Grace, that's OK; until a year ago, neither had Eric Zwieg.
Henry Grace, he said, is "a reinvention of yourself, right?"
So who is Henry Grace?
"He's someone who hasn't played music in like, almost 25 years, you know, on a regular basis, someone who hasn't written songs or played with other people (in a long time)."
That sounds a lot like Zwieg.
"The last time I legitimately played music was in Atlanta, with a couple of bands down there.
Zwieg said. "We put records out. We played the scenes that were happening, played a lot of bars, did some great opening act type stuff."
Then Zwieg, originally from Jamestown, came back to Western New York. That was in 2003.
"Since then, I haven't done anything," Zwieg said. "I hardly picked up a guitar. In fact, I basically gave away all my gear over the years."
A little over a year ago, he showed up at the first Iburi Photography open mic and read from his thesis, and then he formed the musical duo Paris and Holly with Emily Crawford. They performed together at Iburi and GO Art! together for about six months.
During that time, Henry Grace started to emerge. Now, Grace is ready to release his first full-length album, "The Complete Disaster," at a release party at 8 p.m. on Saturday at GO Art!, 201 E. Main St., Batavia.
Music has been part of Zwieg since childhood.
"I was always around music when I was a kid," Zwieg said. "I was fortunate enough to grow up on the grounds of Chautauqua Institute. When I was a kid, in my early adolescence and teen years, I saw amazing artists there, including the symphony and ballet companies and opera, a lot of the big touring acts of the late 60s and 70s. It was a big influence on me and kind of just hurtled me into music."
He started out on trumpet, joined choir and before graduating from high school, he was involved in musical theater.
At 16, he became a drummer (self-taught) in a band. They played Southern Rock in the bards of Jamestown.
"That was a lot of fun," Zwieg said. "It taught me how to deal with bar owners and drunks and everything that goes along with what used to be the only place you could play."
He paused his pursuit of music when he became "domesticated." He became a father when he was 21 and went back to community college and majored in musical theater. During that time, he put his own band together for the first time, Common Man.
"I was writing songs right from the start, playing guitar and singing, and we had a great four-piece band," Zwieg said. "We stuck around for about five, six years, did some recordings, did a lot of regional touring, opening up for some smaller acts. It's a really small scene in Jamestown, but kind of the epicenter because of the fact that the 10,000 Maniacs had made it 10 years before, and so there were a lot of musicians around who were trying to put bands together."
His next band was called The Schmells but the gigs weren't happening, so he started doing solo acoustic work in college bars and coffee houses in Buffalo, Erie, Fredonia, Geneseo, and other college towns.
"It was a funky scene, and it was always better in the small college markets," he said.
In 2016, he came to Batavia and started formal writing programs, earning a bachelor's degree as well as an MFA.
He wrote fiction, plays, and poems and put together theatrical productions, poetry readings, and lectures.
Then the siren song of the musical muse started calling again.
"Music has definitely taken the upper hand because I find it easier to just play by myself and go out into a gig or set things up with other people, rather than putting together a full cast, Zwieg said.
When you put a production together, it is, well, a production. You need rehearsal space and a place to perform as well as the casting and directing."
"It's incredibly time-consuming and I don't want to be a producer," Zwieg said.
He said he would rather be an artist, and music was always central to his life.
All the formal education sparked an interest at working at the craft of songwriting.
"I just didn't have any purpose, really, and I wasn't connecting with people," Zwieg said. "And it's an easy way to connect with people, and even if you're just playing open mics and things like that there becomes a community. And I was trying to create a community at the same time. So yeah, I was definitely trying to motivate myself. Once you put things out in front of you that you know you want to accomplish, or things that you're expected to do ... you become committed to it."
He hosted a series of Henry Grace and Company coffee-house-like shows at GO Art! over the past several months, featuring not just Grace, but also other solo acoustic performers.
"The overall purpose is just to get singer-songwriters to come out of the closet," Zwieg said.
"We've created a bit of an audience there, and that's really the major thing I'd like to parlay that into -- I was hoping for a grant this year, but it didn't come through -- working towards the first Batavia Folk Festival to include all the local folks and local teachers."
So what does Henry Grace write and sing about?
The self, Zwieg said. Not necessarily the personal self but songs that are personal and about selves.
"There's a lot of storytelling in there," Zwieg said. "I like to tell stories. I have been fortunate enough to travel around the country and in Europe and really meet a lot of people. I love to sit and talk and bullshit. Once in a while, you extract something good."
Those conversations made it into journals, and those journals led to a stream-of-consciousness approach to songwriting, he said.
"I would most compare it to somebody like REM, who was a big influence on me when I first started writing songs. A lot of their music is a stream of consciousness, or it's just it's poetic. Things in Michael Stipe just strung together, and that's always stuck with me."
So, in Henry Grace, Zwieg has rediscovered his roots.
"Music has always been my go-to thing," Zwieg said. "I've played it throughout my life and a lot of different kinds of different approaches, but I'm back to the singer-songwriter type of thing now and just really simplifying it."
