Ari Hest has spent the last four years writing and recording a new original song every two weeks, a commitment he calls The Treehouse Project that has produced nearly 100 original songs across that span. The latest batch arrives as The Treehouse Project – Year Three, available on Bandcamp in vinyl and CD. When a songwriter is working at that pace and that depth, a live show stops being a catalog survey and becomes something closer to a look inside a creative life still very much in motion.
About the Show
Hest has been building toward this kind of career for two decades, starting with the college-circuit touring that first grew his following, moving through major label recordings, and arriving at a 2017 Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album, earned through Silver Skies Blue, a duets album he made with Judy Collins. The Boston Globe called him “a prolific songwriter and a captivating live performer,” and those who have followed his work know why: his songs have been described as landing somewhere on the path where Elliott Smith meets Peter Gabriel, which is to say they are melodically precise, emotionally direct, built around a voice that earns close listening rather than demanding it.
Before The Treehouse Project, there was “52”: in 2008, Hest released a new song every single week for an entire year, an act of creative discipline that anticipated everything that followed. The Treehouse Project extends that instinct into something more deliberate — a new song written, recorded, and delivered to Patreon subscribers every two weeks, with fans voting annually on their favorites, which are then remixed and released as albums. It is a model that keeps the songwriter inside the work and the audience inside the process, and it has been running without interruption since early 2022.
Over the course of his career, Hest has shared stages with The Indigo Girls, Martin Sexton, Judy Collins, Suzanne Vega, and Ani DiFranco. His songs have appeared in The Lincoln Lawyer, The Path, Private Practice, Army Wives, and One Tree Hill, the kind of placements that accumulate when compositions hold up in contexts the songwriter did not control.
Venue & Logistics
The show takes place in the Indigo Room at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington, a Hudson Valley theater with a strong record for acoustic programming. Café table seating puts the audience closer to the performer than most stages allow, which is exactly the configuration a songwriter like Hest is built for. Show time is 8:00 p.m.
Tickets
Tickets are $35 general admission (plus processing fees). Buy tickets