Middletown Arts Center • Indoor Summer Nights

Ten Jersey Songwriters, One Stage, and Five Dollars to Get In

Thursday, August 20 • 7:00 to 9:30 PM • $5 donation

Five dollars doesn’t buy much these days. It buys a full evening here. The Middletown Arts Center is packing ten original songwriters into one indoor showcase this week, and the whole thing runs on donation pricing, which tells you plainty about what this venue actually cares about. Not ticket margins. Music that’s real, played by people who’ve spent decades earning the right to call it their own.

Start with the Jersey Shore lifers, because there are a few on this bill and they’ve earned the label. Shotgun Bill, known off stage as Bill Anania, has built a career out of Americana grit, picking up the Indie Music Channel’s 2024 Americana Singer/Songwriter of the Year award along with a 2025 Best Americana Band win. He often shares the stage with Frank Patrouch as the duo Frank & Bill, and Patrouch’s own solo sets lean on the same well of humor and hard earned perspective that comes from a lifetime of playing rooms exactly like this one. Christian Beach rounds out that same scene lineage, having fronted local bands since the late eighties and even toured with Transfusion M on the 2006 Vans Warped Tour before settling into a solo career built on folk and Americana roots. His 2009 debut landed on more than one list of the decade’s best New Jersey records, and he’s kept releasing music steadily since, most recently the DoubleLife, Basement Noise, and Direct and Free EPs.

Dan Toye brings a grittier vocal style to the same stage, the kind that sounds like it was earned rather than trained, built over fifteen plus years of regional shows and anchored by his acclaimed record Goin Home. Michael Brett has covered similar ground from a different angle, blending rock and folk across more than two decades of writing, both solo and fronting The May Darlings, with releases like Serenade Postcards and Dislocate showing off a songwriter who never got lazy with the formula.

Erika Sherger, out of Boonton Township, brings something a little different tonally, a voice that draws fair comparisons to Natalie Merchant and Linda Ronstadt, most recently heard on her 2022 record Bad Wolf. Jim Crawford’s story stands out even in a lineup full of long careers. Scottish born and New Jersey based, he stepped away from music for years before coming back in retirement, releasing Team of My Father and Yelling at Me and quietly becoming a regular at coffeehouses and folk rooms across the state.

Then there are the ones holding the scene together behind the scenes as much as on stage. Roger Gardella has been performing across the tri state area for more than forty years, and as an ASCAP member he’s also spent real time producing showcases for independent musicians, his own album Thanksgiving Day just one piece of a much bigger body of work. Kevin Liebkemann writes about love, everyday life, and, by his own admission, good food, and he hosts the Seaside Ramblers, a boardwalk jam group known for pulling in musicians and listeners alike. Stu Coogan closes out the circle as a guitarist, songwriter, and longtime evening host on Brookdale Public Radio, blending folk, rock, blues, and Americana into performances that feel less like a set list and more like a conversation.

Event Details Thursday, August 20, 2026 7:00 to 9:30 PM $5 donation, all proceeds support the Middletown Arts Center 36 Church Street, Middletown, NJ 07748

GET TICKETS  |  $5 DONATION

Ten songwriters, one room, five dollars at the door. Middletown doesn’t need to dress this up any further, and it doesn’t.