Kate O’Connor and Rico Spence have been playing music together for close to 36 years, decades before the couple got married almost 10 years ago. The Valley duo — O’Connor on keyboards and guitar, Spence on bass, and both on vocals — play everything from rock to jazz, funk, Irish, and world music.
But another thing O’Connor and Spence share is a deep belief in living an environmentally sustainable lifestyle — which they’ll share with audiences at a pair of upcoming concerts, including on Monday, the 49th anniversary of Earth Day.
Since purchasing a house in Westhampton in 2007, O’Connor and Spence, who previously lived in Belchertown, have fitted their home with thermal solar heating panels, photovoltaic solar panels and a greenhouse that produces sustainable, year-round produce. They’ve made other environmentally friendly changes to the way they live, such as driving a Chevy Volt electric/gas car.
“You do charge it as though it were a regular electric car, and it has a small gas engine that will also extend your range,” O’Connor explained. “I teach in Northampton [at Downtown Sounds and Northampton Community Music Center], so I’m back and forth [there].”
Among the many kinds of music they cover — O’Connor and Spence have played for years with the dance bands Blue Rendezvous, The Kate O’Connor Band and others — the couple also write songs about environmentalism, protecting the Earth’s natural resources and climate change.
They’ll offer some of that material when, joined by their percussionist Charlie Shew, they play next Monday at 2 p.m. at the “Green New Earth Day” event at First Churches in Northampton. And on Saturday, April 27, their ensemble, A Beautiful Future, will perform at 6:30 p.m. at Mass Audubon’s Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary in Easthampton. That show will be followed by a climate-cafe-style discussion led by Audubon educator Brittany Gutermuth.
At a recent rehearsal at the couple’s Westhampton home, O’Connor sang and played electronic keyboards, Spence handled a Fender jazz bass, and Shew played a small drum kit with added percussion instruments. The first song was an upbeat jazz-tinged pop song, “Trees.”
“When I introduce this song, I tell people who don’t know about the benefits of trees [that] oxygen is the first one,” said O’Connor, who writes the lyrics to the songs. “Without trees we wouldn’t have the climate that we need to live with. The Earth used to have a lot more nitrogen and not enough oxygen. Trees are what provided us with our good atmosphere.”
“At the rate of deforestation we’re currently at,” added O’Connor, who’s 62, “life is not going to be sustainable. We need to, really quickly, bring back a lot of the forests around the world.”
The trio also played “The Climate Healing Plan,” a jammy rock number with at least 18 verses, all about sustainability. One verse speaks about composting, another about creating a sustainable garden, while others are about climate policy and telling congress to enact a carbon fee.
“You can tell your congress people/to fund power from wind and sun/You can remove your pension money, from all fossil fuel funds/You can resist the building of gas pipelines/to help our precious water keep flowing clear and fine,” O’Connor sang on one of the verses.
The couple also have reduced their plastic and packaging use and airplane travel, and they follow a mostly plant-based diet with no red meat or farm-raised fish, as well as minimal dairy and processed foods.
O’Connor and Spence purchased their Dutch Colonial style home for one reason in particular: The property gets plenty of sunshine, ideal for utilizing solar power.
During a tour of the outside of their home, walking through light green grass and with flower bulbs poking out of the ground nearby, the couple described the process by which they generate heat via two thermal solar heating panels, which reduces their cords of wood for heating by one and a half to two throughout the year.
“There’s a port hole that collects air from the basement, heats it in the panel, and sends it into the kitchen,” O’Connor said. Another panel heats the basement.
Spence said without the thermal solar heating panels, they’d likely go through six cords of wood during the course of a winter. Their home is all electric and does not use fossil fuels.
“That’s being greedy and wanting it toasty starting in October right through May,” he added. “With a New England winter, it’s relentless.”
O’Connor said one of the challenges for the couple and other homeowners is the state’s cap of 12 kilowatts on electricity generated by residential solar installations, a process known as net metering by which solar power users can sell excess energy they generate back to utility companies. She’s hoping that rule can change.
“We went right to the cap — right for the 12kW,” she said. “They will not allow you to take out a loan for more panels. We have room for more panels. We could have got higher wattage panels and generated more power.”
“Putting in mini splits to take care of the rest of the heat load, we could have done it,” O’Connor noted. “But the electric company said, ‘No. We will only give you full credits for 12kW and that’s it.’ ”
She thinks that cap is really limiting the potential of solar power in Massachusetts. With climate change and reduced energy use becoming ever-more important issues, she added, “We really have to let people know that cap has to go.”
Chris Goudreau can be reached at cgoudreau@valleyadvocate.com.
For more information about O’Connor and Spence and their band, visit creativeground.org/profile/beautiful-future
