The Mammals Have an Unpopular Idea: We All Need to Touch More Grass
The Mammals at Elk Creek Café, Millheim, Pennsylvania – August 8, 2026
Any way you drive into Millheim, Pennsylvania, you will pass through the familiar political landscape of rural America. Front yards double as billboards for conservative causes, faded presidential signs, placards for the next township election, declarations of faith, flags and slogans staking out a position in the latest culture war. None of it is unusual for rural Pennsylvania.
But then, almost without warning, you arrive in Millheim. The political signage gives way to rainbow flags, tie-dyed welcome signs, handmade art, community gardens, coffee shops, and little artisan collectives. In the middle of it sits Elk Creek Café, a locally owned venue that feels increasingly improbable: part restaurant, part brewery, part neighborhood gathering place, and one of central Pennsylvania’s most reliable spots for original roots music – featuring local, regional, and national artists.
It was into this little bastion of rural counterculture that Hudson Valley-based Americana band The Mammals arrived Saturday, August 8th, 2026 with an unpopular idea: maybe we’d all be better off staring at fewer screens, looking at each other a little more, and occasionally going outside to touch some grass. They brought the right amount of bluegrass, folk and optimistic energy to make the point.
This premise could easily have made for an evening of earnest folk-music soapboxing. It didn’t. The Mammals are, happily, too much fun. The evening that followed felt less like a lecture on disconnecting from modern life than a two-hour demonstration of what’s waiting for us when we do: friendship, family, the doldrums, gratitude, justice, home. They told those stories with acoustic and electric guitars, banjos, fiddles, and ukuleles, with music that skirted the edges of bluegrass, old-time string bands, traditional protest folk, folk-rock, and even hints of Celtic and Appalachian fiddle music.
The night opened with the buoyant, roots-rock rush of “Bright as You Can,” with singer/songwritier Ruth Ungar Merenda out front and the band stacking voices behind her until the five-part harmony seemed almost too big for the room. The song worked like a how-to guide for paying attention to what’s actually worth having – while you have it.
From there, the band reached considerably farther back for a collaborator: Woody Guthrie. “Born to Win” began as words Guthrie wrote during World War II in response to a gloomy standard, “Born to Lose.” Guthrie left this song as words without music. However, The Mammals gave the song its musical foundation, and eventually recorded it with Woody’s granddaughter Sarah Lee Guthrie in Jack White’s Third Man Record Booth in Nashville.
“Radio Signal” followed, turning the room into a singalong with its searching, open-road chorus, that made the introspection feel communal. Mike Merenda’s narrator goes looking for some flicker of illumination down the backroads of his own soul, and by the time the refrain came around again, a good portion of Elk Creek seemed willing to help him look. We were all ready to reach for a patch of grass.
Then came Ruth Ungar’s “East Side West Side,” maybe the evening’s most explicit attempt to find usable common ground between people increasingly determined not to share any. The song moves north to south and east to west while arguing that disagreement need not cancel out shared responsibility for the land, water, and air. It’s not naïve enough to suggest everyone secretly believes the same things. Its argument is smaller, and probably harder: that agreeing on something is still possible. In Millheim, after driving past all those roadside declarations of who’s right and who’s wrong, the song landed particularly well.
The rest of the first set drew from The Mammals’ sprawling 2025 double album, Touch Grass Vol. 1 & 2 . “Unpopular Ideas” is the record’s thesis statement: and the message is not hidden behind metaphor. It’s a laundry list of convictions about health, war, corporate influence, food, screens, farming, and the increasingly strange ways we’ve chosen to organize modern life. Some of those ideas will earn nods while others will raise eyebrows. And that’s the point. What saves the song from becoming a manifesto handed out on a street corner is the same thing that saved the whole evening from becoming a sermon: The Mammals know how to make conviction swing. Banjo, fiddle, and a deceptively cheerful melody turn the argument into something you can tap your foot to before realizing you’ve been listening to a song telling you to turn off the damn phone, meet your neighbor, plant something, and reconsider aspects of this contemporary American life.
And then, just like a drive through rural America, they left politics behind to appreciate the scenery for a moment. “One Good Friend” distilled decades of friendship into road trips, remembered summers, and the rare person you can call from the highway simply because staying awake is easier when somebody knows you well. “The Doldrums” stared at those stretches when the bad days linger longer than the good ones. “Rolling Stone Refugee” tells of retreating from the noise of modern culture toward friends, family, a garden, and a fire pit, somehow turning social exhaustion into a backwoods anthem. Ruth Ungar’s “Do Good” was quieter, and maybe more radical than any of them: slow down, notice what’s in front of you, be a little kinder. If there were a perfect bumper-sticker sentiment from the whole evening, it was that “doing more isn’t always the same as doing better.”
Taken together, the songs revealed what Touch Grass is actually getting at: proximity. Proximity to your friends, your family, the food you eat, the place where you live, the people across from you. The Mammals’ politics may occasionally be loud, but their proposed remedy is strikingly small-scale: pay attention to the things close enough to touch.
And to let the message sink in: The Mammals took a set break: a welcome, old-fashioned touch. Rather than disappearing backstage behind some imaginary wall between performer and audience, the musicians were suddenly part of the room, talking with people, making new friends – practicing what they were preaching – connection. The Elk Creek Café is unusually well suited to that kind of intermission; the place was conceived as exactly this combination of brewpub, restaurant, music room, and community gathering space, with house-made beer and food built heavily around nearby farms and producers. Here, “local” is not a branding ploy; it’s the official operating manual.
When the band returned, The Mammals turned the voltage up. The second set opened with “Hangman’s Reel,” a traditional fiddle designed to urge people get up and dance. Ungar’s fiddle tore through the melody and the evening tilted from thoughtful folk concert toward Saturday-night string-band party. If the first set showed what The Mammals think about, the second made the case for what they can do.
This distinction that matters: talk of the band’s lyrics and forthright messaging can obscure just how formidable the players are. The current lineup is built around founding members Mike Merenda on guitar, banjo, and vocals and Ruth Ungar Merenda on vocals, fiddle, and guitar, with drummer Tim Morrison, keyboardist and harmony singer Scott Milici and bassist and vocalist Jude Roberts. The arrangement gives them something most folk groups never quite achieve: the intimacy of an acoustic string band with the horsepower of a rock band. Five voices can appear out of nowhere. A fiddle tune can become a groove. A banjo can stop sounding quaint and start sounding dangerous. Top this off with a gritty Hammond organ and all those acoustic textures turn downright rockin.’
And that may be the trick to The Mammals: how do you keep deeply political-charged music from becoming too grim? Their songs worry about families, loneliness, environmental damage, political alienation, corporate power, and whether any of us are still paying attention. But they also believe in fiddle tunes. In harmony. In old friends. In a room full of strangers singing the same line. In the restorative possibilities of a beer, a garden, and sharing some food. The Mammals describe themselves, rather perfectly, as “subversive acoustic traditionalists.” At Elk Creek, both halves of that description were on display. The tradition was everywhere: Guthrie, old fiddle tunes, banjos, communal singing, songs meant to travel from one person to another. The subversion was the suggestion that progress doesn’t always mean adding something new. Maybe it means turning something off. Or knowing your neighbor. Or sitting across a table from somebody whose yard sign you hate. And maybe, every once in a while, it really does mean going outside and touching the grass.
Find tour dates and more info here: http://www.themammals.love