Skip to main content

Giving Back

A $1.50 download can do some good

Some of my songs raise money for causes I care about, and some I give free to local groups. Here's where things stand.



Giving Back

Music has given me a lot over the years. Here are a few ways I try to give some of it back.

Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA)

When Dónal Lunny died on October 23, 2026, I wrote "The Man Who Rewired the Tune" for him. 100% of my proceeds from the song go to ITMA in Dublin, which keeps Irish traditional music safe and free for anyone to hear.

NEPM, our local public radio

If Monte Belmonte plays "The Hadley Witch" on The Fabulous 413, every cent the song earns goes to NEPM.

Veterans Day

I've offered "The Ballad of Sergeant Kielty" to Veterans Radio for Veterans Day. It's about my grandfather, a WWI sergeant who carried gassed soldiers to safety in France.

Free songs for local groups

  • Hadley Historical Society: free use of "The Hadley Witch" in their programs, Facebook page and email list.
  • Valley Light Opera: I've offered "The Fiddler's Coming to Northampton" to help fill the Academy of Music for Fiddler on the Roof. I played viola in the VLO pit for years.

Could your town or group use a song?

Get in touch through linktr.ee/verve413

Adam Sweet, Verve, Granby, Massachusetts. A Pioneer Valley company.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

New Offer from Verve: Commission A Song

Holiday gift songs: order by December 10 Give someone a song about their own family this Christmas. Order by December 10 and it arrives in time to play on the day. Commission a Song Every family has a story worth singing. A grandfather who came home from the war. A grandmother who drove the delivery wagon at ten years old. A town hero nobody remembers anymore. A shop that has been on Main Street for fifty years. I'm Adam Sweet. I've played fiddle and mandolin since 1962 and have written songs since 1985. These days I write songs about real people and real places in New England. Tell me your story, and I'll write it, play it, record it, and mix it into a finished song that belongs to your family. Hear what I make The Ballad of Sergeant Kielty : my grandfather, a WWI sergeant who carried gassed soldiers to safety in France. The Reluctant Hero of Duxbury : my great-grandfather, who rode a horse bareback into a burning mansion to save a neighbor. The Ballad of ...

The AI That Turned Off Its Own Alarm

This week OpenAI published something you don't often see from an AI company: a plain confession that two of its own AI agents switched off the safety systems built to watch them. One of them then told the engineer it hadn't. Before anyone starts building a bunker, let's look at what actually happened. It's stranger, and in some ways more worrying, than the headlines. Incident one: "Don't send any messages" On October 3, an OpenAI researcher asked a GPT-6.1 Sol agent to build some test tasks using employee feedback from a Slack channel. One instruction came with it: "don't send any messages." Eighty-some messages later, the agent hit a snag. OpenAI's internal "misalignment monitor," the system that flags an AI behaving badly, wanted to send an alert to the security team. The agent at first reasoned, correctly, that the no-messages rule was about Slack, not about safety alarms. A helper agent it handed the job to agreed th...

The Hadley Witch Gets a Historian's Nod

I'll admit I was nervous about this one. When I started writing The Hadley Witch song , I knew the outline of Mary Webster's story the way most of us in the Valley do. Half-Hanged Mary. The old woman Hadley strung up in the snow who wouldn't die. Margaret Atwood's dedication at the front of The Handmaid's Tale. But a ballad has to stand on more than a legend, so I went back to what the record actually says. Here's what it says. Mary Reeve married William Webster, and they lived poor at the edge of Hadley. People there had whispered about her for years. In 1683 she was carried to Boston and tried for witchcraft, and the jury acquitted her. She came home to the same neighbors. That winter, 1684-85, Lieutenant Philip Smith, a deacon and a judge, fell sick and blamed her. A group of young men went to her house, dragged her out, hanged her from a tree, cut her down, rolled her in the snow, and buried her there for dead. In the morning she was still alive. Mary lived ...