(Self-released, CD, digital)
Art and artists have a tendency toward escapism during dark times. The golden era of Hollywood musicals took place during the Great Depression. Surrealism and the works of Salvador Dalí and René Magritte were responses to the trauma of World War I. Aqua dropped “Barbie Girl” in 1997, a month after the Heaven’s Gate cult carried out a mass suicide in order to hitchhike on a comet. You get the picture.
Thus far, 2026 certainly qualifies as “dark times” — unless you’re the sort of person who loves civil unrest, authoritarian governments and corporate power run amok. So aside from Lex Luthor, most of us are going through it, one way or another. While the requisite protest music has started to appear — oh, hello there, Mr. Springsteen — there just might be an equal need for some proper sunny vibes and well wishes to cope with a truly brutal news cycle. We can’t doomscroll all day, right?
The self-titled EP from Burlington indie-folk act Blueberry Betty has those felicific tones in spades. While the EP doesn’t seem in response to anything specific per se, such is the state of the world that a song such as “Peach” — with the line “I think that we’re going to be just fine” — does feel like a denial of the dark. Call it a stoned reverie, a naturalistic pull to chilling the fuck out, a safe space to be an empathetic miscreant … Blueberry Betty wants you to breathe deep, engage your vagus nerve and maybe eat something better for your health. Are you sleeping OK, babe? This is an album that’s checking in on you.
Blueberry Betty is the project of singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Ben Schnier. The Utica, N.Y., native and son of moe. guitarist Al Schnier has been around Burlington for about a decade, playing in multiple bands. Since 2022, he’s also served as booking manager at Radio Bean, the de facto headquarters/third space for the Queen City music scene’s vibrant youth movement.
That latter connection permeates the EP. There are traces of Greg Freeman’s tremulous voice in the way Schnier sings on “Drove Down to the Country.” The psychedelic folk of Noah Kesey and tender, melodic grace of Lily Seabird emerge on “I’ve Got a Good Friend & His Name’s Marc.” These hints of other Burlington artists are not emulation or even necessarily direct inspiration; rather, this is the sound of music coming from a fertile, flourishing garden.
Schnier recorded the EP with Chicago musician and producer Austin Koenigstein, aka Smushie. Together they create a tapestry of freak-folk creakiness, a strain of late-stage Americana with a kind of blown-speaker charm.
What keeps Blueberry Betty from coming across as hollow or disposable is the combination of whimsy and rootsy grit that Schnier sprinkles across his songs, like a post-bong hit Randy Newman on a cheaper piano. I mean that as a compliment.
Blueberry Betty drops on Thursday, February 12, at blueberrybetty.bandcamp.com and on major streaming services. To celebrate, Schnier and friends are playing a release show at — where else? — Radio Bean on Saturday, February 14.
This article appears in February 11 • 2026.
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