The Lincoln Theater in Damariscotta has spent the better part of two years celebrating its 150th birthday, marking a century and a half of a building that locals have long called their community living room. On Friday, Oct. 23, at 7 p.m., that room gets a homecoming of sorts: Aly Spaltro, the Brunswick-raised songwriter who records as Lady Lamb, brings "An Evening with Strings" to the theater's stage.
The billing is straightforward enough — a singer-songwriter, a historic hall, a Friday night in October. But the story behind it runs back to a video rental store in Brunswick, where a shy teenager on a gap year first figured out how to write songs.
Spaltro was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1989, and spent much of her childhood in the Southwest, with a three-year stretch in Germany, before her family moved to Brunswick in 2003. She graduated from high school planning to spend a year working with young children in Guatemala. When that plan fell through at the last minute, she found herself home in Maine with a year and no plan at all. She took a job at Bart & Greg's DVD Explosion, the local video store, and started putting her poetry to music, teaching herself guitar and singing along the way.
The arrangement she struck with the store's owners is the part of the story that has followed her ever since. Spaltro worked the closing shift. After she locked up at 11 p.m., she was free to stay — and she did, using the empty store as a makeshift recording studio until five in the morning. "I was given the freedom back then to be as loud as I wanted to be late at night," she told NPR in 2015. "That gave me the power to really express myself that I don't think I would've — my music would've turned out the same if I'd been writing songs in a bedroom."
By day she worked the counter and watched films — she has said she screened "Paris, Texas" every few months, and it still reminds her of the store. By night she layered songs alone, learning as she went. The first Lady Lamb recordings were homemade packages she left on the counter at the Bullmoose record store in Brunswick. She wanted to give them away for free but didn't want them traced back to the girl at the video store next door, so she needed a name that wasn't hers. She had been keeping a notebook by her bed to catch lyrics as she drifted off, and out of that came Lady Lamb the Beekeeper — a moniker she has said she adopted because it let her feel more confident performing.
That gap year turned into a career. Spaltro moved to Brooklyn in 2010, met producer Nadim Issa, and recorded her debut studio album, "Ripely Pine," at Let Em In Music in Gowanus. Released in February 2013 on Ba Da Bing Records, it was her first nationally distributed record and sent her touring across the United States, Europe, and the United Kingdom. She signed to Mom + Pop for 2015's "After," which landed on the Billboard rock, independent, and Heatseekers charts, then followed it with the self-produced EP "Tender Warriors Club" in late 2016 and her third full-length, "Even in the Tremor," in April 2019. In 2023, to mark the tenth anniversary of "Ripely Pine," she released "In the Mammoth Nothing of the Night," a four-LP box set pairing a remastered version of the debut with newly recorded versions of those songs and sixteen previously unreleased tracks written during the "Ripely Pine" era.
"An Evening with Strings" is its own project, and an old one by now. Spaltro first took the format on the road in fall 2021, reworking songs from across her catalog with string arrangements. The tour was meant to feature a five-piece band; a pair of positive COVID tests trimmed it to three players, Spaltro joined by Peter Lanctot and Ginger Dolden. Reviewers described shows that opened with her alone at the center of a dark stage, singing a cappella before touching an instrument. That instinct — hushing a room with nothing but a voice — is one she developed early, and it is the reason her live shows earned her a reputation as a breakout star in New England long before the records did.
The venue fits the mood. The Lincoln Theater began in the spring of 1875, when a group of local residents — David Chapman, Addison Austin, Elbridge Norris, and a few others — banded together to finance a public hall for Lincoln County on a plot of low land tangled with alder and burdock. Bricks were hauled upriver by scow from the Page brickyard in Newcastle, bought at $6 per thousand, and the roof went on by July 13. The building cost $28,500 and took ten months to erect. Its dedication gala in January 1876 featured a concert by the Chandler's Military Band of Portland, followed by a grand march at 9:30 p.m. and a fancy-dress ball; tickets ran $5 a couple at a time when a song sheet cost 30 cents and a hotel room went for a dollar or two a night. The Knox-Lincoln Railroad sold round-trip tickets to bring people in from out of town.
A century and a half later, the theater still runs roughly 500 events a year — first-run films, opera and theater broadcasts, in-house plays, lectures — and draws more than 20,000 visits annually. It marked its 150th anniversary on Feb. 2 with cake, a display of artifacts including pieces of the original chandeliers and seats, the dedication of the Fenniman Lobby, and a screening of Chaplin's "City Lights."
For Spaltro, the Oct. 23 date is a shorter trip. Brunswick, where the songs started, is a little over half an hour up the road from Damariscotta. The theater's listing notes that she has stayed focused on music that "connects, empowers and builds community" from those late nights at the video store through four studio records she co-produced and arranged herself. Tickets are general admission, sold in advance through the theater's online box office, with any remaining seats available at the door beginning 30 minutes before showtime; the theater does not release extra tickets once a show sells out. Advance prices were not listed in the announcement.
What the night will hold is, in the end, a familiar Lady Lamb proposition: a songwriter who learned her craft in an empty room after midnight, standing in a hall built by neighbors a century and a half ago, with a few strings behind her.