Back Porch Swing are coming back to Lethbridge to open up 2012 at the Lethbridge Folk Club.
“We’re very versatile. We’re like 10 bands in one,” said Back Porch Swing guitarist/ mandolinist / vocalist Penny Malmberg over the phone from St. Albert , getting ready to play a gig in Rocky Mountain House.
They play the Lethbridge Folk Club Wolf’s Den, Jan. 14 with Cathy Hawley opening the show and the Twin Butte General store the night before that.
“We like to call ourselves a cow-jazz band,” she said adding they play everywhere they can.
“ We’ve played everything from Bas Mitzvas to to funerals,” she continued.
“We’re pretty much a full time part time band. None of us are brave enough to try to make it a full time full time band. The band members have to work the band around busy careers as engineers and teachers.
“It’s not a full time job for us. We’re not brave enough to quit our jobs and do this full time,” she said.
“We play a lot of folk clubs during the winter, and spend most summers playing folk festivals,” she continued.
But they are no strangers to Lethbridge. They have played the Slice a couple times as well as the Folk Club a few times, but they are always in town for the Green Haven Pumpkin Festival every September.
While Penny Malmberg and her husband Jim often play as a duo, they will be playing with the entire band, violinist Cam Neufeld and Kevin Jacobson.
“Jim and I will play as a duo locally at songwriter nights locally. Jim is a southern Alberta boy, born and raised in Lethbridge,” she said.
“We play a wide variety of music, string band, bluegrass, folk,” she said.
They even play a little bit of rock an roll like rearranged covers of songs like the Rolling Stones’ “Can’t Always Get What you Want.”
And they’ll have some fun with things like the Spiderman theme, which they don’t play as much anymore.
“We were just goofing around one day and we have kids who get tired of listening to us, and they had the TV on and they were playing the ad for the Spiderman movie so we started playing along with it,” she said adding they started playing it at shows and started getting requests for it.
“It’s kind of gone out of favour. We don’t play it a lot now, but if we get a request for it, we’ll play it because it is fun,” she continued.
Back Porch Swing have recently released a new live CD which has some of their favourite covers as well as a few originals.
“We play a lot of covers and people would always ask us if they could buy them on a CD, so we figured now would be the right time to do that,” she said. So they went through several years of live recordings at folk festivals, coffee shops and other concerts and chose their favourites.
The show begins at 8 p.m. with Cathy Hawley opening. Tickets are $20 for folk club members, $25 for non-members
