Steve Forbert Grammy nominee and member of Mississippi Hall of Fame returns to Nell’s after his almost sold out show at Nell’s two ago having had to postpone his concert this autumn.

On February 3, 2017 singer/songwriter Steve Forbert's joyride of a new album, Flying at Night, will be available in the U.S. as an import. The set was officially released last October in the U.K.  Recorded as a collaboration with Forbert's longtime friend, multi-instrumentalist Anthony Crawford, Flying At Night is a pleasure from beginning to end.

“My booking agent in England asked me if I could possibly come up with a release to precede last year's Fall UK tour,” says Forbert. “I completed nine unfinished songs that span several decades—a couple from way back before I left Mississippi, one about my post-rehab life in a culture of alcohol advertisements, one about a rare hour of downtime I had while on tour in 1988 with Edie Brickell and the New
Bohemians.”

“Anthony Crawford and I have worked together off and on since he guested on my album The American in Me (Geffen Records, 1992),” says Forbert. “As producer of Flying at Night, he ran free with the tunes, adding whatever he wanted from his home studio toy box—lead guitar, bass, drums, fiddle, and mandolin.” Crawford, a recording artist in his own right, has toured with Neil Young, Steve Winwood  and Dwight Yoakam.

Steve Forbert traveled to New York City from Mississippi in 1976 and played guitar for spare change in Grand Central Station. He vaulted to international prominence with the folk-pop hit, “Romeo’s Tune,” during a time when the singer-songwriter era had all but ended and Talking Heads, Blondie, and other New Wave and punk acts were moving into the public consciousness. Still, critics raved about Forbert’s
poetic lyrics and engaging melodies, and the crowds at CBGB’s in New York accepted him alongside those acts.

“I’ve never been interested in changing what I do to fit emerging trends,” Forbert observes. “Looking back on it, I was helping to keep a particular tradition alive at a time when it wasn’t in the spotlight”—a tradition that has since seen a thriving resurgence as the Americana genre.

Forbert has amassed a catalog of well-crafted, unforgettable songs on such albums as Streets of This Town, The American in Me, Mission of the Crossroad Palms, and Just Like There’s Nothin’ to It. His tribute to Jimmie Rodgers, Any Old Time, was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2004. He was inducted into the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame in 2010.

“Flying at Night makes for a great companion piece to the autobiography I’ve been working on for two years.” The book, called Big City Cat, covers Forbert’s entire career with a colorful look at his mid-seventies experiences playing both folk and New Wave clubs in Greenwich Village. Big City Cat will be published this fall by pfp Publishing in Boston.