Doors will open an hour early at 6pm for extended kitchen service. Come have dinner with us before the show!

Fifty years have passed in a flash,” says Texas-born, Louisiana-raised pianist, songwriter and vocalist MARCIA BALL of her long and storied career. Ball, the 2018 Texas State Musician Of The Year, has won worldwide fame and countless fans for her ability to ignite a full-scale roadhouse rhythm and blues party every time she takes the stage. Her rollicking Texas boogies, swampy New Orleans ballads and groove-laden Gulf Coast blues have made her a one-of-a-kind favorite with music lovers all over the world. With each new release, her reputation as a profoundly soulful singer, a boundlessly talented pianist and a courageous, inventive songwriter continues to grow. Her love of the road has led to years of soul-satisfying performances at festivals, concert halls and clubs. The New York Times says, “Marcia Ball plays two-fisted New Orleans barrelhouse piano and sings in a husky, knowing voice about all the trouble men and women can get into on the way to a good time.” The Houston Chronicle says simply, “She’s as perfect as an artist can be.

With her new album, Shine Bright, Ball set out to, in her words, “Make the best Marcia Ball record I could make.” In doing so, she has put together the most musically substantial, hopeful and uplifting set of songs of her five-decade career. Produced by Steve Berlin (Los Lobos) and recorded in Texas and Louisiana, Shine Bright contains twelve songs (including nine originals), ranging from the title track’s rousing appeal for public and private acts of courage to the upbeat call to action of Pots And Pans, a song inspired by renowned Texas political writer and humorist Molly Ivins. From the humorous advice of Life Of The Party to the poignantly optimistic World Full Of Love, the intensity of Ball’s conviction never wavers while, simultaneously, the fun never stops. Shine Bright is exactly the album Ball set out to make. “It is a ridiculously hopeful, cheerful record,” she says, in light of some of the album’s more serious subject matter. The secret, according to Ball “is to set the political songs to a good dance beat.”

Born in Orange, Texas in 1949 to a family whose female members all played piano, Ball grew up in the small town of Vinton, Louisiana, right across the border from Texas. She began taking piano lessons at age five, playing old Tin Pan Alley and popular music tunes from her grandmother’s collection. But it wasn’t until she was 13 that Marcia discovered the power of soul music. One day in New Orleans in 1962, she sat amazed as Irma Thomas delivered the most spirited and moving performance the young teenager had ever seen. A few years later she attended Louisiana State University, where she played some of her very first gigs with a blues-based rock band called Gum.

In 1970, Ball set out for San Francisco. Her car broke down in Austin, and while waiting for repairs she fell in love with the city and decided to stay. It wasn’t long before she was performing in local clubs with a progressive country band called Freda And The Firedogs, while beginning to sharpen her songwriting skills. It was around this time that she delved deeply into the music of the great New Orleans piano players, especially Professor Longhair. “Once I found out about Professor Longhair,” recalls Ball, “I knew I had found my direction.”

When Freda And The Firedogs broke up in 1974, Ball launched her solo career, playing clubs around Austin, Houston and Louisiana. She signed with Capitol Records in 1978, debuting with the country-rock album Circuit Queen. Creating and honing her own sound, she released six critically acclaimed titles on the Rounder label during the 1980s and 1990s. In 1990, Ball-collaborating with Angela Strehli and Lou Ann Barton-recorded the hugely successful Dreams Come True on the Antone’s label. At the end of 1997, Marcia finished work on a similar “three divas of the blues” project for Rounder, this time in the distinguished company of Tracy Nelson and her longtime inspiration, Irma Thomas. The CD, Sing It!, was released in 1998 and was nominated for a Grammy Award.

Marcia Ball has appeared many times on national television over the years, including the PBS special In Performance At The White House along with B.B. King and Della Reese, Austin City Limits and HBO’s Treme. She performed in Piano Blues, the film directed by Clint Eastwood included in Martin Scorsese’s The Blues series which aired on PBS television nationwide in 2003. Marcia also appeared on The Late Show With David Letterman with The New Orleans Social Club, where she not only reached millions of people, but also helped to benefit victims of Hurricane Katrina. In 2012, she had a role in the independent film Angels Sing starring Harry Connick, Jr., Lyle Lovett and Willie Nelson. In 2017 she performed on NPR’s A Jazz Piano Christmas, live from The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Ball joined Alligator in 2001 with the release of the critically acclaimed Presumed Innocent. The CD won the 2002 Blues Music Award for Blues Album Of The Year. Her follow-up, So Many Rivers, was nominated for a Grammy Award, and won the 2004 Blues Music Award for Contemporary Blues Album Of The Year as well as the coveted Contemporary Blues Female Artist Of The Year award. Her next release, Live! Down The Road, released in 2005, also garnered a Grammy nomination, as did 2008’s Peace, Love & BBQ (the album debuted at #1 on the Billboard Blues Chart). 2010’s Grammy-nominated Roadside Attractions and 2014’s The Tattooed Lady And The Alligator Man successfully grew her fan base even further. Altogether she holds ten Blues Music Awards, ten Living Blues Awards, and five Grammy Award nominations. She has been inducted into both the Gulf Coast Music Hall Of Fame and the Louisiana Music Hall Of Fame. The Texas State legislature named her the official 2018 Texas State Musician. As her hometown Austin Chronicle says, “What’s not to like about Marcia Ball?”

Since joining Alligator, Ball has blossomed as a songwriter. Each album has been filled with fresh, original songs, never more so than on Shine Bright. Ball easily draws her listeners deep into her music with instantly memorable melodies and imaginative imagery. Her songs paint vibrant musical pictures richly detailed with recognizable characters, regional flavors, universal themes and colorful scenes, both real and imagined. Living Blues declares, “Her originals sound like timeless classics and southern soul masterpieces that no one else can imitate.”

Now, with Shine Bright, Ball’s new, aggressively hopeful songs are energized by Steve Berlin’s inventive and exciting production, creating electrifying music that is daring, inspired, poignant and timely. The Boston Globe calls Ball “a compelling storyteller” who plays “an irresistible, celebratory blend of rollicking, two-fisted New Orleans piano, Louisiana swamp rock and smoldering Texas blues.”

Of course, Ball will bring the party on the road, playing her new songs and old favorites for fans around the globe. “I still love the feel of the wheels rolling,” she says, “and the energy in a room full of people ready to go wherever it is we take them.” With both her new album and her legendary live performances, Marcia Ball will shine a light into the darkness, making the world a brighter place one song at a time.

The soaring choruses, rousing anthems, sprawling guitars and chaotic keys that make up Wolf Parade are on proud display over the course of Cry Cry Cry, the band's thunderous first album in seven years.

That unique combination of sounds and influences, spearheaded by electric co-frontmen Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner-a complex yet relatable, energetic brew of glam, prog, synth-rock, and satisfying discomfort-helped define 2000s indie rock with three critically celebrated albums, and propelled a growing Wolf Parade fandom even after the band went on a then-indefinite hiatus in 2010.

The upcoming return marks their first to be produced by Pacific Northwest legend John Goodmanson (Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, Unwound) at Robert Lang Studios outside of Seattle, and is accompanied by a renewed focus and the creativity of a band that took their time getting exactly where they needed to be. It's also a homecoming to Sub Pop, which released all three of the band's previous albums.

"The band itself is almost a fifth member of the band, something more or at least different than the sum of its parts," says Krug. "We don't know who or what is responsible for our sound, it's just something that naturally and consistently comes from this particular combo of musicians."

"Once we got back together, I was playing guitar, writing and singing in a way that I only do while I'm in Wolf Parade," says Dan Boeckner, who shares primary lyrical and singing duties with Spencer. "It's just something that I can't access without the other three people in the room."

In the time apart, the band scattered geographically and focused on family and other work--Spencer on his solo project Moonface, Dan on his bands Handsome Furs, Operators, and Divine Fits (with Spoon's Britt Daniel), and Dante De Caro on records with Carey Mercer's Frog Eyes and Blackout Beach. And that time allowed for an even stronger, tighter band to emerge.

Eventually, Spencer, Dante, and Arlen found themselves all back living on remote Vancouver Island, accompanied by a population density less than that of Alaska, and the tranquility that leads to creative emanations like a government-sponsored bathtub race. With Dan on the same coast in Northern California, discussions began about picking things up where they left off.

"All of our albums are always a reaction to our last one," says Arlen. "Expo 86 (2010) was about as sparse as we get, which is usually still pretty dense, and this time we wanted to make the palette a little larger." Adds Dante, "Expo was a real rock record. We just sort of banged it out, which was kind of the point." Cry Cry Cry, on the other hand, is more deliberate in its arrangements and embrace of the studio process. "If a part was going on for too long it would get lopped, you know?" says Dan. "That being said, there are two very long songs on the record and I don't think it would be a Wolf Parade record if it didn't have some kind of prog epic."

"I think we're actually a better band than we were when we stopped playing music together," says Arlen. "A little bit more life experience for everybody, and people having made a bunch of records on their own."

The result of this new consciousness is songs like "Valley Boy," a Bowie-inflected anthem for which Spencer wrote lyrics after Leonard Cohen died the day before the 2016 election ("The radio's been playing all your songs, talking about the way you slipped away up the stairs, did you know that it was all gonna go wrong?"). "You're Dreaming," also influenced by the election and the spinning shock that followed, is driving, urgent power pop that draws from artists like Tom Petty and what Dan calls one of his "default languages" for writing music. The swirly, synth-heavy crescendo of "Artificial Life" takes on the struggle of artists and at-risk communities ("If the flood should ever come, we'll be last in the lifeboat").

The album carries a sense of uprising that is not unrelated to Wolf Parade's renewed determination to drive the band forward in uncertain times. Welcome to Cry Cry Cry.

All right
Let's fight
Let's rage against the night
- "Lazarus Online" (Spencer Krug)

Robert Brashear is a singer/songwriter in New York City and former city of Pittsburgh resident. Since returning to performing in 2015, after a long hiatus, Robert as both a solo singer-songwriter and with his "Home(Away) Band, has played all five boros of Manhattan, both coasts of Florida, from Portland in the northwest corner of the country to Lake Worth on the southeast, Pittsburgh, Louisville and Asheville and Berlin, Dublin and Copenhagen and most recently Argentina and Uruguay. He is featured on the just released ep "Hearing Double" by New York City icon, Marie Mazziotti.(https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/mariemazziotti8) His first album "Robert Brashear: Songs. Vol.1" will be released this summer. He recently produced (with Luba Dvorak) "Stay Awhile With Me: the songs of RL Haney," a tribute to one of New York City's "most unique and obscure artists"...(https://www.cdbaby.com/cd/stayawhilewithmethesongs).

Last December he had his first booking at the legendary "Bitter End" and in May begins a monthly first Sunday residency at "Sidewalk Cafe." He has collaborated and participated in a wide range of events and festivals from the "One Day: a Festival" produced by the Work Center of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards of Pontedara, Italy to performance with artist Heide Hatry's "Icons in Ash" to most recently with Guggenheim award winning composer Carman Moore and photographer Jacob Holdt (of "American Pictures" fame) in Copenhagen. Home (Away) has been described as a "floating musical collective" with differing configurations, from general Americana to electric blues. Their first gig was a December 2014 appearance with folk legends Christine Lavin, Suzzy Roche, Lucy Wainwright Roche and Julie Gold. Robert has also done side work with DK and the Joy Machine and violinist Liz Taub as well as an ongoing collaboration with singer-songwriter Steve Blane and the regular collaboration with Hot Glue & the Gun.

Aparna started out doing comedy in her hometown of Washington D.C. and now resides in New York City. 2016’s Elle’s Women in Comedy Issue, featured her as one of the most exciting new voices to hit the comedy scene. She is a series regular in the debut season of Comedy Central’s Corporate and has reprised her role in season 2 of HBO’s CRASHING. Aparna is also featured in the second season of Netflix’s The Standups. Other television credits include Netflix’s Master of None and LOVE, HBO’s High Maintenance Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer, appearing as a US correspondent for Dave’s (UK) Unspun with Matt Forde, and Hulu’s I Love You, America with Sarah Silverman. In 2018 she makes her feature debut in the Paul Feig movie A Simple Favor. Her TV stand up appearances include Seeso’s stand up series Night Train with Wyatt Cenac, season 2 of Comedy Central’s Meltdown as well as Adam Devine’s House Party. In 2013, she made her late night stand up debut on TBS’s Conan and was one of the breakout New Faces at the prestigious Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal. Her TV writing credits include Late Night with Seth Meyers as well as being a regular correspondent/writer on FX’s Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell. She is also an alumna of the NBC Stand Up for Diversity program and currently headlines throughout the world and has been seen at a number of festivals including Comedy Central’s Clusterfest, Portland’s Bridgetown Comedy Festival, Moontower, SF Sketchfest, DC’s Bentzen Ball, Outside Lands, Bonnaroo and Dublin’s Vodaphone Comedy Festival. Aparna’s been featured on and in NPR, Reader’s Digest, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post Magazine, XM Radio, and Slate V. She can regularly be seen performing at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade’s in LA and NYC. Her debut album Just Putting It Out There was released in July 2016 by Tig Notaro’s label Bentzen Ball Records and hit the #4 on Billboard Comedy Charts.