MANCHESTER, NH — The scene is plucked from Billy Joel’s bibulous bar anthem, only instead of a piano player, a one-woman band performs onstage beside a plastic tip jar.
It’s 9 p.m. on a Saturday as Becca Myari finishes tuning her guitar and starts her first set for a tipsy crowd at The Strange Brew Tavern in downtown Manchester.
Myari, a 30-year-old local minstrel with a folk style and booming pipes, is performing her swan song show for New Hampshire—for now, that is.
In two days, Myari will pack her small car and haul it south on the interstate, trading Granite for Sunshine. In Florida, she plans to help her uncle launch an open-air market during the winter months, while pursuing her music.
“Everything is up in the air,” Myari said. “But I want to come back next summer. I love New Hampshire, and it resonates with me. It’s a place where I’ve always felt at home.”
Myari’s music is a veritable celebration of sundry styles and sounds. At one point, an exuberant member of the audience[1] hops on the stage and performs a river dance with the singer. Myari utilizes a guitar looper, a foot tambourine and occasionally plays the pennywhistle, producing the resonant sound of a full band.
“My inspirations were Celtic, but I love all kinds of music,” she said.
A Long Island native, Myari’s family moved to Canaan, New Hampshire, with Becca and her six siblings—she now has nine brothers and sisters—when she was 8 years old. Myari said that her mother brought music into the household. “My mom loved music, and she introduced us to harmonies,” she said.
While Myari took limited piano lessons and learned the basics of music theory as a young child, she is largely self-taught. At 13, she began to pursue her own interests in music, learning to play the pennywhistle and simultaneously listening to Avril Lavigne.
Then, at 15 years old, Myari’s younger brother purchased an acoustic guitar off Amazon and offered to trade it to his sister for a $5 and one of her pennywhistles. “I didn’t mean to be a slime-bag, but I guess I was,” she joked.
With her first guitar secured, Myari began experimenting with tunings and finger-picking strings, eventually teaching herself chords and mastering the instrument.
Myari already wrote poetry, so the transition to songwriting felt seamless and organic. Her lyrics are largely rooted in nature, and Myari finds that her music is a way of communing with the natural world.
“When I started writing, I let it come in and wrote it as it was,” said Myari. “It feels meditative and natural. It’s oneness with something that is channeling through me.”
Myari and five of her siblings eventually began performing under the name The Santa Croce Band, and one fortuitous night at a private backyard party in Keene, they ran into the late banjo player Gary Skillings, who encouraged the siblings to play out at local venues.
“It got me comfortable being on stage and talking into a microphone,” Myari said.
At 25 years old, Myari moved to Nashua to pursue bigger markets in southern New Hampshire and establish a presence on the local music scene. It was then she began embracing the synergy of live music. “Performing live gets me connected to the energy that exists in all of us,” said Myari. “I have a harder time finding it on my own.”
And the audiences have noticed the energy and talent exuded in her live performances, as well as her original music available on various streaming platforms.
“Becca has that special something that comes from being born into music, a life lived to serve music, to make it, share it and perform it with an unflinching determination and originality,” said Rob Azevedo, host of the radio program “Granite State of Mind,” which has featured Myari, among many local musicians.
Myari said she has also endured some frustrations trying to navigate the music world on her own. “It’s sometimes tough for a musician who books for themselves to get gigs when a venue decides to go through a booking agent,” she said.
Still, Myari said she is going to miss performing in New Hampshire—particularly Manchester—while residing in Florida. “[Manchester crowds] are attentive, respectful audiences, and the owners are very considerate toward the musicians,” she said.
In the meantime, Myari is looking forward to continuing to record original songs and follow them up with music videos with the help of her friend and cinematographer Jackson Stone, who produced the video below for her single “Touched.”
“The videos give people more of a sense of what the song is about,” Myari said.
Eventually, Myari aspires to release a full album, but for now, she plans to keep her “hands in the earth” and her expectations in the hands of a higher power.
“I tried planning my life, but that blew up,” she said. “Now I’ll try to let go and let God, taking my own hands out of it. I think good things will come of it.”
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[1] This person may or may not be friends with this correspondent.
