Rose Polenzani

Polenzani had lived in the Boston area for about four years when a visiting friend, Ithaca guitarist Gabriel Tavares, dragged her to see Session Americana at a club called Toad in Cambridge's Porter Square. The band consists of six talented multi-instrumentalists who sit around a specially designed traveling table and play mostly cover songs -- a mixture of classic Americana, like "Pancho and Lefty," and Prince songs done as Americana -- at a regular weekly session, originally at Toad on Sundays and now at the Lizard Lounge, down Massachusetts Avenue toward Harvard Square on Tuesdays.

Session Americana regularly encouraged guests to sit down and play with them. One Sunday evening in 2005, that guest was Rose Polenzani. The chemistry was immediately apparent. A few months later, the band invited her to contribute to a children's record they were making.

"I brought two songs to the studio," Polenzani recalled. "One, I had the chords for, and the other, I didn't. We just figured it out and recorded them live, sitting in a big circle." For her, this was a new way of doing things, and she immediately saw possibilities for her own songs. "I started to think, 'This would be so great to make a record this way.' "

Polenzani's introduction to Session Americana was part of a greater immersion in the vibrant, sprawling, and pedigreed music scene of Cambridge and Boston. She had dropped out of college in Chicago to join that city's music community in the late 1990s. "Music in Chicago was a good thing," Polenzani said, "but not for acoustic music. The joke there was that 'folk' was a four-letter word. This was before folk and Americana became what they are now."