Pete Francis

As the bassist of Dispatch, Pete Francis Hemibold was no stranger to huge audiences; the folk-rock jammers from Middlebury, Vermont, played their 2004 farewell shows in front of enormous crowds in Boston and reunited for a brief run of benefit gigs in New York City's Madison Square Garden. His career as a solo artist began before the band's demise however, when Pete ditched his surname and began releasing records in 2001. His steady output of solo work yielded a number of LPs on the Scrapper label through the '00s, collections of folk-based rock and pop songwriting with a confessional bent.