John Wright will be ready to rock at this weekend's Regatta

• Lehto, Wright & Jacobs

submitted photo The trio of Steve Lehto (from left), Matt Jacobs and John Wright is scheduled to perform at 6 p.m. Friday on the Unvarnished Music Festival stage at Worthington’s Sailboard Beach.

Talk about it

WORTHINGTON — John Wright is no stranger to the Worthington Windsurfing Regatta and Unvarnished Music Festival. As a professional musician, he has played there several times over the years in several guises — with two bands, Benderheads and Galactic Cowboy Orchestra, and as a duo, Lehto & Wright.

For Unvarnished 2012, he’ll change it up one more time, turning the duo into a trio: Leto, Wright & Jacobs. His cohorts are Steve Lehto and Matt Jacobs.

What distinguishes the trio from the duo?

“It’s louder” he said with a laugh. “It’s the same music with the addition of electric guitar and drums. Really, the band started out as a rock band. That was the concept back in 1999, and then we kind of went in reverse, morphed into an acoustic duo. We discovered that we could play a lot more venues as a duo. You become a folk duo and you can play folk venues, play house concerts. We’ve probably done as many duo gigs as trio gigs over the past 12 years.

“I like them both,” he added. “But really the heart of us is being a little louder and being outside and turning up the amps.”

Wright is a full-time musician who plays acoustic guitar, bass guitar, bass pedals and sings vocals.

“I play music full-time, and Steve (Lehto) doesn’t, and neither does the drummer (Jacobs),” Wright explained. “Steve is a very very serious hobbyist. He’s a professional, but he’s part-time. The fact that he doesn’t have to derive his sole income from this gives us a certain amount of artistic freedom. We do whatever we want to do, so if we get gigs and people buy our records, it’s win-win.”

Lehto’s talents are on acoustic and electric guitars, mandolin and vocals. Jacobs adds drums and assorted percussion to the trio.

“Celtic rock is a good general descriptor” of what Lehto, Wright & Jacobs performs, Wright said. “We do Celtic music that draws people’s ears, genuine Celtic music with traditional songs and dance tunes that have been arranged for a rock band. We play American folk music as well.

“When we started out, the idea of taking traditional English and Irish and Scottish tunes and rocking them out was not unheard of,” Wright continued. “We were not the first. There are groups that have been doing this since the ’60s. … I wanted to take that same formula and apply it to American folk music. We didn’t know anybody who had done that, done the same treatment, unless you consider American country music, which is the sound of bluegrass, electrified, not taking traditional songs. So we did it, but we still ended up being a Celtic rock band.”

The group’s latest CD is called “November.”

“Which is why it came out in January,” quipped Wright. “It’s a good one, I like it a lot. It has one of our latest hits, a song called ‘Shenandoah,’ Steve’s arrangement of the American folk song. It’s become one of our biggest fan favorites. So before we had a greatest hits CD, and now we have a greatest hit.”

Wright promises that the Worthington concert will feature at least three tracks off the new CD, as well as some of their previous work.

And on a positive note weather-wise, Wright noted that in his previous history with the festival, his performance has never been pre-empted due to inclement conditions.

“When I was there with the Galactic Cowboy Orchestra, the forecast that day had 90 percent chance of thunderstorms, and when we got there, it was just blue sky,” he recalled.

Hopefully, Lehto, Wright & Jacobs will take the stage under another clear blue sky at 6 p.m. Friday.

On the Net:

http://www.lehtoandwright.com/

Daily Globe Features Editor Beth Rickers can be reached at 376-7327.

Tags: news, regatta, music, worthington