Going ‘Home’ again: New documentary spotlights folk band
The 40-minute film follows folk/rock band “The Anna & Mickey Show” as they prepare for their first studio recording.
A song that Concordian Anna Huckabee Tull wrote over a decade ago gets a new life in an upcoming documentary.
Rearranged to be more upbeat and feature additional instruments, “Home” includes highlights of the town: rivers, the “rude bridge,” and Walden Pond. It also defines “home” as a place you feel safe and willing to be brave.
In the 40-minute film about Huckabee Tull’s folk/rock band, “The Anna & Mickey Show,” the musicians cultivate a feeling of home when rehearsing every week and overcome their fears when recording together in a studio for the first time.
“There’s this interesting energy that happens when they play together, as opposed to working as a bunch of soloists,” says filmmaker Rob Whittlesey. “They’re all having a good time trying to figure out how to make whatever song they’re doing [in] a way that’s truest to the way they see themselves as performers and musicians. That was fun to watch, and I hope that will come across.”
Whittlesey, a retired Emmy-winning filmmaker of PBS documentaries, was looking for a local band to follow when he came across Huckabee Tull’s group during an event at First Parish.
He spent about a year filming “The Anna & Mickey Show” as band members rehearsed in Huckabee Tull’s Acton home, performed around town, and recorded the new version of “Home” in an Acton studio.
The band’s most devoted followers were to assemble for a film screening at the 1780 House this month, with another screening for a wider audience in the works for this winter.
The core corps
In addition to Huckabee Tull on guitar and vocals, the band includes Mickey Zibello (vocals, guitar), Dave Carter (accordion, guitar, vocals), Kristin Moore (fiddle, vocals), Noah Mendelsohn (bass guitar), and rotating drummers Nick Buni and Eli Zibello.
“Anna brings us songwriting skill, and Mickey brings us arrangement skill, and I get to be lucky enough to go along for the ride, lay low, and then have fun,” Moore, who lives in Acton, says in the documentary. “That’s why we’re doing it. We’re not trying to build musical careers or make money. We just want to do a thing that feels really cool.”
Huckabee Tull and Zibello have been playing together for several years, but the other bandmates are fairly new to the group. Working on the documentary has solidified their connections, Huckabee Tull says: “In our private interviews, we got very emotional and talked about how special this band is, so it’s had this very positive impact on us.”
A ‘very magical’ place
As Zibello says in the film, playing in a band is like “being married to five people. You’ve got a relationship with all of them, and you bring all of your most intense personal stuff to it eventually, if not right away.”
This summer, the band released the new version of “Home” on Spotify and a trailer of the documentary made by Huckabee Tull’s son, Ben, a filmmaker (and Acton-Carlisle High School alum) now living in Chicago. Huckabee Tull is looking for a Acton venue to screen the film and have the band perform this year. “It’s suited for an experience in a room with a bunch of people,” she says.
To her, the town is a “very magical” place.
“It’s a really fascinating mix of Native American energies and Transcendental energies and revolutionary energies,” she says. “To have all that come together, and then to see it in this documentary, to see our camaraderie and our joy and our message and this love for this town — it’s a really striking thing, and it’s made us all so much closer.”
‘Drawn to those energies’
When she was an English major at Denison University in her home state of Ohio, Huckabee Tull spent a year comparing the journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau to their published works.
“Long before I had ever been here, like many people that hear about Acton or read ‘Walden,’ I felt very drawn to those energies,” she says.
Huckabee Tull has lived in Acton for 17 years with her husband, Jim. She splits her time between being a life coach and composing music on commission. She said she spent about two days writing “Home” for the inaugural TEDx Walden Pond event in 2012, when she sang it on stage with just her guitar.
Last year, she wrote another Acton-inspired tune, “We Gather Here,” an original song commissioned by the Acton Museum for the semiquincentennial of the Revolutionary War’s first skirmishes.
One issue sometimes comes up when the band performs “Home,” which begins with this line: “We make our homes here where the two rivers come together.” She says the concept of “two rivers” came to her while writing — “you can call it a vision or a channeling or just an imagining” — and she has stuck by it despite being reminded that Acton has the Sudbury, Assabet, and Acton Rivers running through it.
She stands by the original wording, noting that the rivers converge. “That’s the way it showed up for me, and I decided to stay true to that feeling,” she says.
