A Beautiful Future

ABOUT

A Beautiful Future starts with passion and compassion today, the only day we have to make it better for tomorrow.

We are a team of dreamers combining songwriting and performing music with our bands and climate healing chorus, and our lifestyle initiatives following our personal climate healing plan. These activities help us celebrate the invigorating gifts from our natural world, and promote and enact changes towards a more sustainable world in which humans live in balance and harmony with nature and each other.

Where A Beautiful Future Started

Our beautiful future journey began with a song written by Kate O’Connor, titled “A Beautiful Future”. It was written when Kate and Rico, longtime career musicians, songwriters, and social activists, were looking for a new home where we could start fresh in a place with good land to grow more food and lots of sun for solar energy. We were starting to go in some new musical directions including creating a multicultural children’s music show we called “A Beautiful Future”, after the same-titled song Kate wrote, which expresses our hopes and desires for a kinder, safer, and more sustainable world.

Our Climate Healing Plan (for home and lifestyle):

In the last 15 years, our social and environmental justice energy became refined to focus on ways we could reduce our contributions to climate change. In our new home, we outlined and implemented parts of a climate healing plan with incremental multi-year goals to adopt a more climate-friendly lifestyle as time and finances would allow. See our plan

Climate Healing Chorus

It was only natural for our lifestyle visions and dreams to inform and inspire our songwriting and musical expressions around healing our climate. We began writing, performing, and recording climate healing songs around 2015. We started the climate healing chorus in 2019 to share our songs, dreams, and activism with more people.

We hope you can join us with your own dreams and plans for a beautiful future in whatever way you can.

Kate O’Connor

Co-Founder, Kate O’Connor is a longtime career musician and band leader who has entertained audiences throughout New England, Bermuda, and Florida with her stellar vocals, keyboards, steel drum, and guitar playing, and her original R & B, Jazz, Pop, and Rock compositions.

Kate is the best vocalist award winner from newspaper polls in the Western Massachusetts region and was a longtime studio session vocalist for #1 hit songwriter Tony Romeo (I Think I Love You).

Kate performs with A Beautiful Future Band, (Caribbean, Irish, and multicultural original music), Catalytics Swing Band, and Blue Rendezvous, (R & B, Blues, and Swing); and teaches music lessons at the Northampton Community Music Center, Smith College, and Downtown Sounds.

Rico Spence

Co-Founder, Rico Spence is a self-taught master groove musician who has performed thousands of dates with multiple groups over his long music career. He plays bass guitar, drums, percussion, guitar, and sings.

He has performed with the James Montgomery Band, James Cotton Band, Helen Hollins Gospel Singers Band, Dar Williams, George T Gregory Band, First Rate, Paris, and many other musical acts. With his bands, he has shared stages with Earth Wind and Fire, Patti Labelle, Doobie Brothers, Chambers Bros, Average White Band, BB King, Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters, The Pointer Sisters, and many more.

As a studio musician, his talents are found on hundreds of recordings including those by Dar Williams, Brookes Williams, Richard Berman, etc.

Rico currently performs with A Beautiful Future Band (Caribbean, Irish, and multicultural original music), Blue Rendezvous (R & B, Blues, and Swing), and Catalytics Swing Band.