This show has been postponed to 2021 - more info coming soon

For nearly two decades, Willie Watson has made modern folk music rooted in older traditions. He’s a folksinger in the classic sense: a singer, storyteller, and traveler, with a catalog of songs that bridge the gap between the past and present. On Folksinger Vol. 2, he acts as a modern interpreter of older songs, passing along his own version of the music that came long before him.

Southern gospel. Railroad songs. Delta blues. Irish fiddle tunes. Appalachian music. Folksinger Vol. 2 makes room for it all. Produced by David Rawlings, the album carries on a rich tradition in folk music: the sharing and swapping of old songs. Long ago, the 11 compositions that appear on Folksinger Vol. 2 were popularized by artists like Leadbelly, Reverend Gary Davis, Furry Lewis, and Bascom Lamar Lunsford. The songs don’t actually belong to those artists, though. They don’t belong to anyone. Instead, they’re part of the folk canon, passed from generation to generation by singers like Watson.

And what a singer he is. With a quick vibrato and rich range, he breathes new life into classic songs like “Samson and Delilah,” one of several songs featuring harmonies from gospel quartet the Fairfield Four. He’s a balladeer on “Gallows Pole,” whose melancholy melodies are echoed by the slow swells of a four-piece woodwind ensemble, and a bluesman on “When My Baby Left Me,” accompanying himself with sparse bursts of slide guitar. “Dry Bones” finds him crooning and hollering over a bouncing banjo, while “Take This Hammer” closes the album on a penitent note, with Watson singing to the heavens alongside a congregation of Sunday morning soul singers.

Arriving three years after Folksinger Vol. 1 — his first release since parting ways with the Old Crow Medicine Show, whose platinum-selling music helped jumpstart the 21st century folk revival — Vol. 2 expands Watson’s sound while consolidating his strengths. Several singers and sidemen make appearances here, including Gillian Welch, the Punch Brothers’ Paul Kowert, and Old Crow bandmate Morgan Jahnig. Even so, Watson has never sounded more commanding, more confident, more connected to the music that inspires him.

“I’m not trying to prove any point here,” he insists, “and I’m not trying to be a purist. There’s so much beauty in this old music, and it affects me on a deep level. It moves me and inspires me. I heard Leadbelly singing with the Golden Gate Quartet and it sounded fantastic, and I thought, ‘I want to do that.’ I heard the Grateful Dead doing their version of ‘On the Road Again,’ and it sounded like a dance party in 1926, and I wanted to do that, too. That’s the whole reason I ever played music in the first place — because it looked and sounded like it was going to be a lot of fun.”

Nodding to the past without resurrecting it, Willie Watson turns Folksinger Vol. 2 into something much more than an interpretation of older songs. The album carries on the spirit of a time nearly forgotten. It taps into the rich core of roots music. It furthers the legacy of American folk. And perhaps most importantly, it shows the full range of Willie Watson’s artistry, matching his instrumental and vocal chops with a strong appreciation for the songs that have shaped not only a genre, but an entire country.

This show has been cancelled - refunds avail at point of purchase. All tickets purchased through ticketweb will be automatically refunded. For those purchased at Dave's Music Mine or Club Cafe please email feedback@clubcafelive.com

With a GRAMMY nomination under his belt and two major label albums to his credit, Brent Cobb is embarking this spring on a stripped back acoustic tour in seated venues with the assist of an accompanist. He decided that it was important for his fan base to hear the songs showcased the way they were written, giving his award winning lyrics their due. The tour will kick off in Austin, Texas this February and run through the month of March.

Cobb’s songwriting career does not begin and end with his solo accomplishments. Brent has also secured cuts with Luke Bryan, Kenny Chesney, Miranda Lambert, Little Big Town, and Lee Ann Womack, and toured with artists like Chris Stapleton and Margo Price. He received a Grammy nomination for Best Americana Album for 2016’s Shine On Rainy Day, and issued his most personal album yet, 2018’s Providence Canyon.

As 2019 was winding down, he dropped the single “Feet Off the Ground” with Jade Bird, released a three-part video series called Come Home Soon, and completed his headlining Sucker for a Good Time Tour.

He credits his touring history for inspiring the quicker pace of the material on Providence Canyon. “I’ve always liked the funkier side of country and the funkier side of rock,” he explains. “Those influences have been a part of me for years, but they’re really coming to the forefront now. When you’re touring with Chris Stapleton, and you’re performing to a crowd of 10,000 people before he hits the stage, you find yourself wanting to play something upbeat.”

If Shine On Rainy Day felt like a laidback country album for front-porch picking sessions, then Providence Canyon is built for something bigger. This is music for juke joints, pool halls, and roadhouses, filled with electric guitar (performed by Cobb’s touring bandmate, Mike Harris), B3 organ, percussive groove, and co-ed harmonies. Each song was captured in a small number of takes, with Brent and Dave Cobb relying on instinct and spur-of-the-moment ideas.

“It’s in the blood,” Brent says of his connection to his cousin, who has overseen award-winning records for Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, and Chris Stapleton, as well as Shine On Rainy Day and Providence Canyon. “We didn’t grow up together, but we’re so similar in our approaches. It’s important to me to do this with him, because these songs are about the places I’m from, the places I’ve visited, and the people who’ve taken me there. My family is all over these songs.”

Cobb doubles down on his commitment to his wife and daughter with “Ain’t a Road Too Long,” whose mix of Bible Belt boogie-woogie and Southern rock channels influences like the Band. On the drawling, guitar-driven “Mornin’s Gonna Come” and “Sucker for a Good Time,” he battles against the temptations of the road, where the drinks are free and the nights are long. Then, on the album’s breezy title track, he casts his mind back to his teenage years and trips to Providence Canyon, a 150-feet gorge in the sandy clay of southwest Georgia, less than an hour’s drive from Cobb’s hometown.

“Growing up, I didn’t know the definition of ‘providence,’” he admits. “I looked it up in my early 20s, and the definition is something like ‘the protective power of God—or nature—as a spiritual power.’ When I read that, it inspired the whole song. I was 23 at the time, and I missed the old days and the freedom of youth. Years later, I still try to keep my music honest and somehow sacred.”

Nathaniel Rateliff
And It’s Still Alright

What began as a solo album about the painful slow dance of the unraveling of a relationship turned into something altogether different when Richard Swift, Rateliff’s longtime friend and producer of the Night Sweats’ two albums, passed away in July 2018. This period jogged something out of his restless subconscious, helping him address some big life questions -- the ones that have stumped philosophers, statesmen and profound thinkers since time began, exploring the unsteady terrain of love and death. But in the end, what he really was doing was creating an homage to his friend. Summing up, Rateliff says, “I think this album is a reminder that we all go through hardship, but regardless of the hardship everything ends up where it’s supposed to. Regardless of where I’m at after Richard’s death and my divorce, and getting older, I still continue to live and I still continue to find joy. I think that’s the theme of the record.” The new record, ‘And It’s Still Alright,’ is out February 14th, 2020.

Growing up in rural Missouri, Nathaniel Rateliff got his early music education from his family, who performed in the church band in which Rateliff played drums, and his father’s record collection. At 19, Rateliff moved to Denver where he spent the next ten years working night shifts at a bottle factory and a trucking company while testing out songs at open-mic nights. Preceding the emergence of Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, Nathaniel released three albums and an EP; Desire and Dissolving Men (2007), In Memory of Loss (2010), Falling Faster Than You Can Run (2013) and the Closer EP (2014). The solo releases received critical praise— Vanity Fair proclaimed, “We were blown away,” while Paste furthered, “Rateliff’s rich voice and his bandmates’ textured harmonies sound like long and comfortable conversations.” and the New York Times declared, “Pensive, Rousing, Stark, Eloquent…Cash Echoes.”

Stewart Lee listens to Sweating The Plague

I’ve been walking two hours a day since March to beat middle-aged inertia, pacing myself exclusively to a playlist of 3,148 songs featuring Guided by Voices’ Robert Pollard, in his various guises. GBV sets me on fire! The Regent’s Canal towpath melts beneath me and Angel’s pounded pavements evaporate.

For the uninitiated, Pollard’s prolific but private basement four-track recording habit, Guided by Voices, finally found fame on the surface world in the early nineties, by which time the Dayton Ohio schoolteacher was already in his mid-thirties with thousands of completed songs stored in a suitcase.

As a ‘70s schoolboy, Pollard performed the usual adolescent music fan rituals, scribbling exercise books full of song lyrics and designing imaginary album covers for fictional bands influenced by the classic rock, British invasion and early prog sounds he assimilated as a little kid in the ‘60s. And then he grew up, and just carried on.

Since 1983, Pollard has been putting his childhood fantasies into action through Guided by Voices, the band he wills periodically into being in various incarnations, a bricolage recreation of millions of remembered rock moves, realised with the assistance of a shifting set of acolytes, and an incurable addiction to the onanistic vice of songwriting.

As I hit the Southern stretch of The New River path those 3148 Pollard songs are endlessly recombining themselves as random and unrepeatable new patterns, in jarring audio-collages accidentally attuned their creator’s painstaking cut and paste aesthetic.

Pollard’s overflowing artesian well of phonetically seductive phrases are fashioned into thousands of one-in-a-million pop hooks, and then tossed away without any apparent effort, scattered like great careless handfuls of abundant seed. Unleash The Large Hearted Boy! Do Not Devastate! Impossible Octopus!

Guided By Voices is now an unlikely candidate for the most perfect rock band of all time, whilst at the same time being a thoughtful reflection on what a rock bands is, a fantasy that becomes a fact.

3148 songs. Thirty-six years of sound kaleidoscope into an invisibly seamed stream with no obvious entry or exit points, the sound born fully formed and already on its trajectory. By Stoke Newington I’m blitzkrieged.

Pollard may be endlessly experimenting with the formal limits of the rock song but, at the same time, rooms full of drunken fans in their thousands are chanting “G B V!”, making his conceptual exercise pungently real.

Guided by Voices’ second album of 2019, Warp and Woof, welded boom-box recordings and on-the-hoof impromptu sessions into a coherently collaged collection. In contrast, their third album of this year, and the band’s 29th, experiments playfully with stadium sized fidelity and uncharacteristically impactful arrangements.

Ever since producer Travis Harrison worked on Pollard and long-term guitarist Doug Gillard’s 2011 Lifeguards album Waving At The Astronauts, his approach to Guided by Voices was that, counterintuitively, that he didn’t want it to sound homemade. Sweating The Plague is constructed as a classic 12 song album experience, made to be played loud.

The grinding techtonic plate guitars of Doug Gillard and Bobby Bare Jr. anchor the opener, “Downer”, and set out Sweating The Plague’s stall, before the chunky indie-pop surge of "Street Party”, and "Mother’s Milk Elementary”, a typical Pollard attempt to squeeze the multiple movements of some early ‘70s epic into a two and a half minute package, complete with Mellotron-hued outro. Bob had literally dreamed the piece into being, waking with the different sections of a song on an album his subconscious mind had imagined him purchasing humming in his head, and running downstairs to record it.

“Heavy Like The World"’s subliminally seductive earworm hook gives way to "Ego Central High", a stadium-filling slice of hairy riffing; "The Very Second” sounds like a produced realisation of the chopped-together compositions of GBV’s late eighties output; “Tiger On Top" splices coffee-shop acoustic moments into extended splurges of hard rock swagger, the vibe bleeding through into the similarly strutting "Unfun Glitz", before the Southern jangle-rock sound of “Your Cricket Is Rather Unique" spins long-term listeners back to the aesthetic of the band’s 1986 debut, Forever Since Breakfast.

Immortals valedictory anthemic upsurge plateaus out into the acoustic chimes of "My Wrestling Days Are Over" before the uncharacteristically substantial closer, "Sons Of The Beard", posits a kind of blue-collar plaid-shirt progressive rock. The multiple tidal phases hoary progenitors like Janus or Gnidrolog spread over the twenty minutes in 1971, are here concertinaed down into a tight four minutes forty-nine, Pollard finally finding a place in GBV itself for influences formerly side-lined into his now abandoned Circus Devils project.

Sweating The Plague is an uncharacteristically concise rock’n’roll record, with lush gems tucked in amongst the hooks and hits, and with a sprinkling of prog rock moves. And, as usual with Pollard, the album is sequenced as a whole, a coherent collection, rather than a selection of downloadable content baubles.

Being a fan of Pollard, and Guided by Voices, can feel like standing in a ticker tape parade and reaching out to grab at stray releases as the endless flurry of output from the Needmore Songs publishing house billows around you. But here’s twelve compatible nuggets of Pollard content in one handy package, all boxed up and ready to go.