Upcoming Concerts

Rescheduled from May 13 - All tickets honored

Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band has built its reputation the long, slow, hard way. After 12 years of playing as many as 300 shows each year, Rev. Peyton, the world’s foremost country blues finger-style picker, along with the biggest little band in the country has pieced together one of the most dedicated followings out there. This following is sure to eat up the band’s latest offering, Poor Until Payday, (the second on their own Family Owned Records label through hip Nashville indie Thirty Tigers) out October 5th, a country blues record that was made the right way — two feet on the ground and both hands getting dirty.

With all the power of a freight train, the Big Damn Band is known for its live shows. Rev. Peyton delivers guitar pyrotechnics the old fashioned way — ten fingers, a 6 string and an amp cranked at full tilt. In the country blues style, he plays the bass with his thumb, while picking the lead with his fingers at the same time. When he lifts the guitar behind his head to play there’s nothing but skill and 16 gauge nickel strings to make the sounds coming out of the speakers.

Beside him on stage are just two other people. His wife, “Washboard” Breezy Peyton playing with all the nuance and percussive power of a New Orleans drum line, and keeping the train moving is Max Senteney on a lean drum kit including a 5 gallon maple syrup bucket. Together they play Peyton’s wildman country blues that’s as much ZZ Top as it is Bukka White.

On Poor Until Payday Peyton wanted a sound as live and electric as the records made in the heyday of 45 rpm blues classics from Chess, Stax and Sun Records. Playing his beloved custom-made National steel resonator, a 1949 Harmony Archtop, a 1954 Supro Dual Tone and a 1955 Kay Speed Demon through a 1949 Supro amp, Rev wanted to restore the “warmth, pops and hisses” mostly eliminated by modern-day compression. The band played in a room together with minimal micing (using only the best classic pieces they could get) with the main effect being tape saturation.

That’s it.

The result is an album that is direct, soulful and demands to be played loud.

The themes of songs like the title track, “You Can’t Steal My Shine” and “I Suffer I Get Tougher” offer the antidote to today’s hard times by touting “perseverance, inspiration and hope… being your authentic self despite everything lined against you, a light at the end of the tunnel.” With a vocal style reflecting both the soulfulness and bite of his idols, Rev has added world-class singer to his already-renowned skills as a finger-pickin’ guitar phenom. Breezy and Max also contribute background vocals to most of the songs, with “The Miss Elizabeth of Country Blues” actually taking the spotlight with a sultry call-and-response showcase on “Dirty Swerve,” in which she also contributed to the writing.

Peyton’s blues pedigree is well established. Woodshedding since he was 12, Peyton has kept alive a tradition of finger picking pioneered by the likes of Mississippi John Hurt. However, Peyton plays with the energy and attitude of a Howlin’ Wolf. Indeed if it has strings he can play it whether that’s a custom-built National, a cigarbox, an axe or even a shotgun (seriously, Google it.).

He’s done his homework and been given the blessing of the gatekeepers of the tradition — even befriending and touring with some of the last of the great Delta Blues and Hill Country blues legends like David “Honeyboy” Edwards, T-Model Ford (whose grandson calls him Unk), and Robert Belfour.

Rev and Breezy make their home in rural southern Indiana near the adopted home of bluegrass legend Bill Monroe, among national parks and forests in what began as an artist’s colony. “Most of the people here can both paint a picture and skin a deer,” laughs Breezy.

There’s nothing dusty or sentimental about Peyton’s music, though. There’s no songs about picking cotton. They aren’t a museum piece. The Big Damn Band have taken nearly a century of blues songsmanship and crafted a thing all their own. There is not a single act out there that sounds like this.

The Big Damn Band make friends and fans every place they go — and there are few places they haven’t been, having performed in 37 countries. After Poor Until Payday, the only people who won’t be on the big damn bandwagon will be people who haven’t heard or aren’t paying attention.

This is real, from the heart, handmade music made by people, for people who don’t have time for BS.

Rescheduled from May 14 - all tickets honored

Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band has built its reputation the long, slow, hard way. After 12 years of playing as many as 300 shows each year, Rev. Peyton, the world’s foremost country blues finger-style picker, along with the biggest little band in the country has pieced together one of the most dedicated followings out there. This following is sure to eat up the band’s latest offering, Poor Until Payday, (the second on their own Family Owned Records label through hip Nashville indie Thirty Tigers) out October 5th, a country blues record that was made the right way — two feet on the ground and both hands getting dirty.

With all the power of a freight train, the Big Damn Band is known for its live shows. Rev. Peyton delivers guitar pyrotechnics the old fashioned way — ten fingers, a 6 string and an amp cranked at full tilt. In the country blues style, he plays the bass with his thumb, while picking the lead with his fingers at the same time. When he lifts the guitar behind his head to play there’s nothing but skill and 16 gauge nickel strings to make the sounds coming out of the speakers.

Beside him on stage are just two other people. His wife, “Washboard” Breezy Peyton playing with all the nuance and percussive power of a New Orleans drum line, and keeping the train moving is Max Senteney on a lean drum kit including a 5 gallon maple syrup bucket. Together they play Peyton’s wildman country blues that’s as much ZZ Top as it is Bukka White.

On Poor Until Payday Peyton wanted a sound as live and electric as the records made in the heyday of 45 rpm blues classics from Chess, Stax and Sun Records. Playing his beloved custom-made National steel resonator, a 1949 Harmony Archtop, a 1954 Supro Dual Tone and a 1955 Kay Speed Demon through a 1949 Supro amp, Rev wanted to restore the “warmth, pops and hisses” mostly eliminated by modern-day compression. The band played in a room together with minimal micing (using only the best classic pieces they could get) with the main effect being tape saturation.

That’s it.

The result is an album that is direct, soulful and demands to be played loud.

The themes of songs like the title track, “You Can’t Steal My Shine” and “I Suffer I Get Tougher” offer the antidote to today’s hard times by touting “perseverance, inspiration and hope… being your authentic self despite everything lined against you, a light at the end of the tunnel.” With a vocal style reflecting both the soulfulness and bite of his idols, Rev has added world-class singer to his already-renowned skills as a finger-pickin’ guitar phenom. Breezy and Max also contribute background vocals to most of the songs, with “The Miss Elizabeth of Country Blues” actually taking the spotlight with a sultry call-and-response showcase on “Dirty Swerve,” in which she also contributed to the writing.

Peyton’s blues pedigree is well established. Woodshedding since he was 12, Peyton has kept alive a tradition of finger picking pioneered by the likes of Mississippi John Hurt. However, Peyton plays with the energy and attitude of a Howlin’ Wolf. Indeed if it has strings he can play it whether that’s a custom-built National, a cigarbox, an axe or even a shotgun (seriously, Google it.).

He’s done his homework and been given the blessing of the gatekeepers of the tradition — even befriending and touring with some of the last of the great Delta Blues and Hill Country blues legends like David “Honeyboy” Edwards, T-Model Ford (whose grandson calls him Unk), and Robert Belfour.

Rev and Breezy make their home in rural southern Indiana near the adopted home of bluegrass legend Bill Monroe, among national parks and forests in what began as an artist’s colony. “Most of the people here can both paint a picture and skin a deer,” laughs Breezy.

There’s nothing dusty or sentimental about Peyton’s music, though. There’s no songs about picking cotton. They aren’t a museum piece. The Big Damn Band have taken nearly a century of blues songsmanship and crafted a thing all their own. There is not a single act out there that sounds like this.

The Big Damn Band make friends and fans every place they go — and there are few places they haven’t been, having performed in 37 countries. After Poor Until Payday, the only people who won’t be on the big damn bandwagon will be people who haven’t heard or aren’t paying attention.

This is real, from the heart, handmade music made by people, for people who don’t have time for BS.

Cult-indie band Murder By Death is hitting the road this winter to celebrate 20 years since their first show.

Setlists each night will be curated by fans and the band will be playing songs from all 8 records in their catalog. Every ticket comes with a free zine at the show, looking back at the last 20 years of MBD. Don't miss this chance to sing along, stomp your boots, and sip your favorite libations in celebration.

Wide Awake! is New York’s Parquet Courts’ fifth record since their formation eight years ago. It’s also their most groundbreaking. It’s an album about independence and individuality but also about collectivity and communitarianism. Love is at its center. There’s also a freshness here, a breaking of new territory that’s testament to the group’s restless spirit.

In part, this may be attributed to the fact that it’s produced by Brian Burton, better known as Danger Mouse, but it’s also simply a triumph of their songwriter’s art. The songs, written by Austin Brown and Andrew Savage are filled with their traditional punk rock passion, as well as a lyrical tenderness, but are elevated to even greater heights by the dynamic rhythmic propulsion of Max Savage (drums) and Sean Yeaton (bass).

The plan from the start was to introduce new musical ideas previously unexplored by the band. These were varied. For Brown, a few of the touchstones were Grace Jones, The Upsetters, Townes Van Zandt, Parliament and Augustus Pablo. For Savage though, the soundtrack to the sessions in Electric Lady Studios in New York and later at Sonic Ranch in Texas, was different.

“I found myself listening to a lot of ‘80s American punk,” he explains, “I’m talking about Big Boys, Minutemen, The Dicks, Flipper. Bands that were no doubt punk but don’t quite fit in. I’ve always loved the playfulness of Minutemen and Big Boys, and especially the way the latter mixed funk into their sound.”

Two early examples of what these influences meant in practise for the record arrive early. “Violence,” the album’s blistering second song, revisits the proto hip hop of “He’s Seein’ Paths” from 2013’s “Tally All The Things That You Broke” EP. Savage’s furious denunciation of the casual acceptance of violence as part of everyday life is given even greater urgency following the recent shootings in Florida and Sutherland Springs.

“Mardi Gras Beads,” on the other hand, offers a complete different, texturally ambitious standout moment. Brown has never been so vulnerable on a Parquet Courts record, and the band, for all their ferocity, has never played so movingly; it’s a prime example of Brown “writing songs I’ve been wanting to write but never had the courage.”

The band credit their producer Brian Burton with helping them carve out the essence of an idea and bringing his polish to the album.

“The ethos behind every Parquet Courts record is that there needs to be change for the better, and the best way to tackle that is to step out of one’s comfort zone,” Savage says of the unlikely pairing. “I personally liked the fact that I was writing a record that was aggressive and indebted to punk and funk, and he’s a pop producer who’s made some very polished records recently. I liked the idea that it didn’t make sense to work with him, which to me makes total sense as to why we should work with him.”

“I was expecting bringing in a producer would be a redefining element of the band, someone who would pilot us to a new place entirely,” expands Brown, “however where Brian excelled was rather to hold a mirror to the group, and help us bring out our best versions of ourselves.” Indeed it was Danger Mouse, an admirer of the Parquet Courts who originally reached out to work with them.

The record also reflects a burgeoning confidence in the band’s exploration of new ideas in a hi-fi context. For his part, Savage was determined not to make another ballad heavy record like the band’s 2016 Human Performance. “I needed an outlet for the side of me that feels emotions like joy, rage, silliness and anger,” he says. They looked to play on the duality between rage and glee like the bands Youth of Today, Gorilla Biscuits and Black Flag. “All those bands make me want to dance and that’s what I want people to do when they hear our record,” adds Savage.

For Brown, death and love were the biggest influences. One of the most courageous songs on the new record is “Death Will Bring Change,” a moving elegy, with a chorus not unlike the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” only this time, London’s Bach Choir were 15 twelve year olds from the upper east side being recorded at 9am on a Saturday. “Nothing scarier,” says Brown.

The songs on Parquet Courts new record also make you think of what Joe Strummer of The Clash once said, about why he wrote songs – i.e. “to expand people’s vocabularies.” So set against the likes of the elegiac “Mardi Gras Beads” is the opening track “Total Football.” Named after the eponymous theory of soccer pioneered by the Dutch that requires every player to be able to play every position on the field, it has shout-outs to iconic individualists like the painter Cy Twombly, the poet Mina and sculptor Eva Hesse.

It’s a song about “opposing the tired alpha-male-lone-wolf archetype that too many people rely on as an avatar,” Savage explains, and lauding “creative and inspiring individuals (the song also touches on KoBrA, The Beatles and The Black Panthers) that approached individuality in a way that wasn’t contrary to collectivism, and vice versa.” Much like the band themselves – four individual artists forging a brave new world of sound.

Ultimately then the message contained in Wide Awake! is complex. “In such a hateful era of culture, we stand in opposition to that — and to the nihilism used to cope with that — with ideas of passion and love,” Brown says. For Savage, it comes back to the deceptively complex goal of making people want to dance, powering the body for resistance through a combination of groove, joy, and indignation, “expressing anger constructively but without trying to accommodate anyone.”

That they’ve managed to weave such disparate themes into such a unified whole says everything about Parquet Courts’ achievement on Wide Awake!. This isn’t just another record by them, it might well be the record.

FIT FOR A KING use the tools of heavy music and melodic hooks to honestly explore the dark side of the human experience, ultimately wrenching timeless hope from the jaws of anxiety, depression, and seemingly certain despair.

No matter the pristine picture of self-worth we project, in the unquenchable pursuit of recognition and affirmation, the gnawing anxiousness of guilt and brokenness chews away at our spirits, uncovering new pain and vulnerability.

Dark Skies is FIT FOR A KING’s evocative declaration of a hard won victory. “This album is far from happy. It’s about personal struggles,” explains singer Ryan Kirby. “It touches on many subjects relevant to all of our daily lives.”

The music and message of FIT FOR A KING is a battle cry against the darkness. This is a sound that stands in defiance of the mounting pressure of modern life, not through dismissiveness or easy answers, but with earnest struggle. The four young men of FIT FOR A KING are just like the rest of us. They hurt, they bleed, and in that raw transparent authenticity, they offer true solidarity. Beneath the most vicious downpour, they cling to unrelenting grace.

Like trailblazing metalcore giants Underoath and As I Lay Dying before them, FIT FOR A KING skillfully mine the varying extremes of this music, building a catalog that sees them at home on tours with hard rock and deathcore bands alike. The band has traveled the United States and Europe with Vans Warped Tour, Beartooth, Every Time I Die, August Burns Red, The Amity Affliction, Whitechapel, For Today, After The Burial, and Attila to name a few.

Kirby, guitarist Bobby Lynge, drummer Jared Easterling, and bassist/vocalist Ryan “Tuck” O’Leary are easygoing and affable on the road, effortlessly maneuvering within the various social circles with goodwill and charm, without sacrificing an ounce of what they believe or who they are. It’s something the Texas band’s growing following respects. Simply put, FIT FOR A KING is real.

FIT FOR A KING was built with bootstrap ethics and do-it-yourself vigor. On the strength of self-released material, the group joined Solid State for a string of successful albums that connected with the downtrodden and dispossessed. Creation/Destruction (2013) debuted at Number 6 on the Hard Rock chart. Slave to Nothing (2014) cracked the Top 50 of Billboard’s Top Current Albums. Deathgrip (2016) climbed to Number 5 among Hard Rock Albums.

Recorded with celebrated producer/mixer Drew Fulk (I Prevail, Motionless In White, Memphis May Fire), Dark Skies is a collection of diverse anthems powered by the undeniable weight of truth-telling emotional vulnerability.

“Tower of Pain” takes unbridled heaviness to breathtaking heights. “Shattered Glass” is a killer throwback to the band’s most aggressive earlier work. Songs like “Price of Agony” see the quartet soaring to new melodic heights with unrestrained urgency. “Anthem of the Defeated” veers in yet another direction, evoking the percussive power of Slipknot or Mudvayne. Yet all of it is anchored in FIT FOR A KING’s signature sound, one their fans trust.

“Debts of the Soul” is an examination of the sleeplessness that comes with ruminations on the nature of death. “When Everything Means Nothing” is a challenge to unplug from the vapid desperation of putting on a front online. “Oblivion” is one of the most faith-based songs the band has released. The song’s narrator pleads in the chorus, “Tell me I won’t be forgotten.” It’s a
reminder of the grace of God and the power of true forgiveness without end.

No matter the political divisions, the staggering alienation arising from our paradoxical and increasingly “connected” world, or the mistakes we all make, FIT FOR A KING offer a foundation of open-mindedness and compassion.

“We're a very transparent band. We aren’t pretending to be something we're not,” says Kirby. “We don't want to act like rock stars and we also don't want to act like we're poor musicians that can barely eat everyday. We don’t portray a false image. We want people to know exactly who we are.”

FIT FOR A KING cherishes unwavering honesty. Even under Dark Skies.

This show has been cancelled, tickets purchased through Ticketweb will be automatically refunded

“The last ten years have been a rollercoaster of deep despair and amazing opportunities that somehow present themselves at the last possible second,” says Eef Barzelay. “During that time, the band bottomed out, my marriage was crumbling, I lost my house, and I had to declare bankruptcy. The only way to survive was to try to transcend myself, to find some kind of deeper, spiritual relationship with life. Once I committed to that, all these little miracles started happening.”

‘Forever Just Beyond,’ Barzelay’s stunning new album under the Clem Snide moniker, may just be the most miraculous of them all. Produced by Scott Avett, the record is a work of exquisite beauty and profound questioning, a reckoning with faith and reality that rushes headlong into the unknown and the unknowable. The songs here grapple with hope and depression, identity and perception, God and the afterlife, humanizing thorny existential issues and delivering them with the intimate, understated air of a late-night conversation between old friends. Avett’s production is similarly warm and inviting, and the careful, spacious arrangement of gentle guitars and spare percussion carves a wide path for Barzelay’s insightful lyrics and idiosyncratic delivery.

“I look up to Eef with total respect and admiration,” says Avett, “and I hope to survive like he survives: with total love for the new and the unknown. Eef’s a crooner and an indie darling by sound and a mystic sage by depth. That’s not common, but it’s beautiful.”

Named for a William S. Borroughs character, Clem Snide first emerged from Boston as a three-piece in the early 1990’s, and the group would go on to become a cult and critical favorite, picking up high profile fans from Bon Iver to Ben Folds over the course of three decades and more than a dozen studio albums. NPR highlighted the Israeli-born Barzelay as “the most underrated songwriter in the business today, with a sneakily firm grasp on poignancy and humor,” while Rolling Stone hailed his songwriting as “soulful and incisive,” and The New Yorker praised his music’s “soothing melodies and candid wit.”

Barzelay currently resides in Nashville, TN.

This show is being postponed - new make up date to be announced asap

An exhilarating blast of blues, soul and funk, Music!Music!Music! marks the recorded debut of the musical partnership between guitarist Charlie Hunter and vocalist Lucy Woodward.

The duo first performed together in February 2018, when Woodward, fresh off supporting her fourth solo album,met Hunter through their friends in Snarky Puppy at the GroundUP festival in Miami.

Woodward joined forces with Hunter as a last minute fill in on a tour he'd originally booked with another singer whose visa had been denied. Bonded by their shared love of blues, Hunter and Woodward quickly constructed a setlist of favorite songs and hit the road. Within less than a week of playing shows together, they realized that they'd hit upon something very special, indeed.

Hunter and Woodward are individually known as solo artists but have collectively toured and recorded with D'Angelo, Rod Stewart, Snarky Puppy, John Mayer, Pink Martini, Norah Jones and Celine Dion.

Music!Music!Music! features eleven radically reworked covers of songs by artists ranging from Blind Willie Johnson and Bessie Smith to Nina Simone and Terence Trent D'Arby. Soulful, spacious and deliciously in the pocket, Music!Music!Music! showcases the dazzling interplay between Hunter's funky guitar and Woodward's powerful voice, while also reflecting the spontaneity and good vibes of the duo's live performances

After 15 years of recording and performing, Thao Nguyen, of San Francisco-based band Thao & The Get Down Stay Down, was exhausted. She had been touring the band’s 2016 album A Man Alive, a critically acclaimed, bone-shaking reckoning about her relationship with her absent father. She was scoring commissions, guest-hosting the podcast Song Exploder, and exploring other paths as an artist. She bought a house with her girlfriend; they’re married now.

In the past 15 years, Thao has avoided being fully out in her public career, having been raised in—and deeply loving—a family and culture distanced from mainstream America’s social progress. As she confronted the division, shame, grief, and silence in her life, Thao found new ways to live in her own skin, and forced her own hand to make a new, different record. In doing so, she created a space wherein she can finally exist as her full self.

Temple is the fifth full-length album from Thao & The Get Down Stay Down. Produced by Thao and bandmate Adam Thompson, who shares songwriting credit on five tracks, it is also their first self-produced album. Mixer Mikaelin “Blue” Bluespruce (Solange, Skepta, Carly Rae Jepsen) widens the band’s register with beat-forward mixes and immersive, lush tones.

Kaleidoscopic and danceable, grounded by Thao’s singular voice, Temple feels boldly dissonant while still highly accessible. Golden, longing pop meets punk roots. Rock draws from hip-hop, funk, and folk rhythms for intricate, danceable beats. The poetic lyrics are expansive, yet shatteringly personal, inspired in part by the work of writers like James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, and Yiyun Li.. Rage, honesty, clear-eyed regret, and optimistic wisdom run parallel, finding a new way forward.

A temple is a place of worship and sanctuary. We spend our lives searching for temples where we can belong and be loved, but those spaces can also be a kind of confinement. Temple is an album that pushes open boundaries for a different kind of sanctuary, where you don’t have to whisper.

The music of Austin-based singer/songwriter and guitarist Slaid Cleaves is rooted in country and traditional folk songs, but it is unusual enough to have held interest in a sea of singer/songwriters across the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. While he released a handful of recordings during the early '90s, he gained significant notice with No Angel Knows, which was released on Rounder's Philo subsidiary in 1997. Joined by former Lucinda Williams guitarist Gurf Morlix, Cleaves combined his passion for folk songs, blues, and traditional country music into an amalgamation of styles known as Americana. Not surprisingly, the album rode high into the charts at Americana-formatted radio stations around the U.S. and Canada in 1997. The release set the tone for the rest of his career.
Prior to entering the music industry, Cleaves majored in English and philosophy at Tufts University in his native New England, and began playing music in garage rock bands while still in high school. While in college, he learned guitar, and later spent a summer in Ireland. He began busking on the streets in Cork, and that was the turning point when he decided to become a folksinger. At Tufts, he developed his guitar skills and studied the music of Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen. He recalled that he had listened to the music of Guthrie, Carl Perkins, and Hank Williams as a child, so he went back into his parents' attic to discover a treasure trove of albums.

After many years in Portland, Maine, he sought new mountains to climb, and found some of them after moving to Austin, Texas, in 1992. Despite the echelon of great singer/songwriters like Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Lucinda Williams, Robert Earl Keen, Guy Clark, and Joe Ely all centered around the Austin scene, Cleaves was able to make a name for himself there. In 1995, he recorded an independent album for Rock Bottom Records entitled Life's Other Side. In 1996, he began his collaboration with Morlix, who liked Cleaves' demo tape and ended up serving as producer for 1997's No Angel Knows.

During the following decade, Cleaves released Broke Down (2000) and Wishbones (2004) prior to switching to Rounder proper for Unsung (2006). After signing with Jimmy LaFave and Kelcy Warren's Music Road label, he issued Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away (2009, featuring liner notes from fan Stephen King), the two-disc Sorrow & Smoke: Live at the Horseshoe Lounge (2011), and Still Fighting the War (2013). The title song of the latter album was inspired by Craig F. Walker's Pulitzer-winning photo essay regarding a soldier's postwar civilian life. 2017's Ghost on the Car Radio found Cleaves exploring the traditions of American small town life.

Rescheduled from April 5 - all tickets honored

Based out of Fort Worth, Texas, The Unlikely Candidates are an indie rock band initially formed as an acoustic duo by childhood friends Kyle Morris and Cole Male in 2008. Eventually expanding the lineup to include guitarist Brenton Carney, bassist Jared Hornbeek, and drummer Kevin Goddard, the band was also able to expand its sound in bigger, more sweeping directions. In 2013, the band signed on with major-label Atlantic and released their debut EP, Follow My Feet. In early 2016, the Unlikely Candidates returned with a hooky new single in “You Love Could Start a War,” which made a strong showing on Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart.

Over the last decade, Real Estate have crafted warm yet meticulous, pop-minded music, specializing in soaring melodies that are sentimentally evocative and unmistakably their own. While 2017’s In Mind longed for normalcy against the backdrop of a life as strange as a touring musician’s. The Main Thing brings that longing to a universal and urgent place, acknowledging the anxieties inherent in protecting a quiet existence. Reflecting on their collective concerns – existential, environmental, political – the group’s fifth album is the result of many deep conversations, resulting in a collectively renewed commitment to their music and a desire to push themselves harder than ever in the work that they love so much. What emerges is a superlative collection of interrogative songs as full of depth, strangeness and contradictions as they are lifting hooks.

“I’ve got this family, and I feel this responsibility to gild this crazy world,” says guitarist, singer and primary songwriter Martin Courtney. The record’s most sentimental moments, then, are crystallized home movie flashes directed at Courtney’s children. “I can’t imagine what will be / in your earliest memories,” he sings on “You.” These mentions are set against darker realities; on “A Silent World,” he pleads, “Can’t let you wander off / Out in this wicked world.” Then there’s guitarist Julian Lynch’s first authored song for the band, “Also A But,” in which disembodied vocals intone “a poison bloom” and “mushroom cloud” apocalypse, set against sci-fi synths, unresolved guitars and propulsive drums. Instead of exploiting the juxtapositions between these opposing emotional modes, Real Estate embraces cohabiting contradictions. “It didn’t feel dark to me,” Courtney clarifies. “To me, it’s the normal stuff.”

This duality is built into the arrangements themselves, interlocking emotionally with the nuance of the lyrics. “Gone,” about casting out toxic phantoms of the past, sets ominous descending strums against dirge-y drum machine before clearing the air with a lilting guitar lead. “Procession,” hallmarked by a bright, two-note motif set under shifting chords and beats, pits hometown pining against generational complacency. The effect is like gazing through a rearview mirror masked by fog, a sentimentalism so obfuscated you’re forced to look forward instead. “We create our own nostalgia. I’m constantly moving so I have more to reflect on,” explains Courtney. “If you look at the first record, it was a wistful feeling we wanted to explore. As we get older, the complexity has become more obvious,” adds bassist and singer Alex Bleeker. That’s paralleled in the album artwork itself; the band enlisted Bjorn Copeland of Black Dice, whose visual work focuses on recycling byproducts of consumer excess, to mimic the layout of Days. Bleeker describes their intention as “the understated Real Estate layout run through Bjorn’s pedalboard.” The effect is uncanny, reflective of this record’s astute self-awareness.

Real Estate’s collaborative evolution saw each member experimenting in new roles. Drummer Jackson Pollis, whose love for soul classics like Curtis Mayfield is transparent in his in-the-pocket groove, also performs synth. Keyboardist Matt Kallman composed “Sting,” one of the two cinematic interludes that grace Side D of The Main Thing. The record’s instrumental epilogue, “Brother,” is a four-year-old cassette demo from Courtney, whose parts were tracked over and replaced by his bandmates. Courtney, in turn, inspired by the lush detail of Joni Mitchell’s Hejira, subbed certain basslines note-for-note on a synth. Recording over the course of a year in countless sessions at Upstate New York’s Marcata Sound, the band reenlisted engineer Kevin McMahon, who helmed their sophomore effort Days. And for the first time, they brought in outside players to round out the sessions: filmic string arrangements recall the seventies scoring of Jean Claude Dennier; Amelia Meath of Sylvan Esso provides a delicate duet on the Chic-tinged, self-satirizing ode to stagnancy “Paper Cup”; Pollis’ rhythmic focus is rounded out by up-front percussion and congas provided by Matt Barrick of The Walkmen and Aaron Johnston of Brazilian Girls, respectively.

A working title for Real Estate’s fifth album was Special Album. Instead, they settled on The Main Thing. In part, it’s a reference to the Roxy Music song: “Even before we decided where to record or who to record it with, I knew it needed to sound that good,” enthuses Courtney. “Which is an impossible goalpost, and a good thing.” But the “main thing” has another meaning for the group: a declaration of music making’s centrality to their own senses of self. “We discovered through the care and attention that we brought to this record that making music to resonate with other people is our catharsis,” says Bleeker. “The ‘main thing’ is following your path of inspiration, and hoping to inspire that in people around you. Hopefully the album itself will reaffirm peoples’ commitments to themselves and to each other, as it did for us.” Classic Real Estate reference points are still here – Yo La Tengo, Felt, Steely Dan – but they’re refined into hazier grooves, expanded into extraterrestrial sonic layers, deepened into slow-rolling phases. You can’t hit an impossible goalpost, but you can come close. Pouring all their hopes, dread, excitement, love and labor into these pristine arrangements, Real Estate made The Main Thing a special album indeed.

30 miles west of El Paso, surrounded by 3,000 acres of pecan orchards and only a stone’s throw from the Mexican border, the band Big Thief (a.k.a. Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek, Max Oleartchik, and James Krivchenia) set up their instruments as close together as possible to capture their most important collection of songs yet. The band had only just finished work on their 3rd album, U.F.O.F. -“the celestial twin”- days before in a cabin studio in the woods of Washington State. Now it was time to birth U.F.O.F.’s sister album -“the earth twin”- Two Hands.

In sharp contrast to the wet environment of the U.F.O.F. session, the southwestern Sonic Ranch studio was chosen for its vast desert location. The 105-degree weather boiled away any clinging memories of the green trees and wet air of the last session. Two Hands had to be completely different— an album about the Earth and the bones beneath it. The songs were recorded live with almost no overdubs. All but two songs feature entirely live vocal takes, leaving Adrianne’s voice suspended above the mix in dry air, raw and vulnerable as ever. Where U.F.O.F. layered mysterious sounds and effects for levitation, Two Hands grounds itself on dried-out, cracked desert dirt.

Anybody who has borne witness to Big Thief in the wild will find songs they recognize here. Much of the album’s tracks (“The Toy”, “Those Girls”, “Shoulders”, “Not”, “Cut My Hair”) have been live staples for years. “Two Hands has the songs that I’m the most proud of; I can imagine myself singing them when I’m old,” says Adrianne. “Musically and lyrically, you can’t break it down much further than this. It’s already bare-bones.”

Lyrically this can be felt in the poetic blur of the internal and external. These are political songs without political language. They explore the collective wounds of our Earth. Abstractions of the personal hint at war, environmental destruction, and the traumas that fuel it. Lyrics like “And the blood of the man who killed my mother with his hands is in me/ it’s in me/ in my veins” are genuine attempts to point the listener towards the very real dangers that face our mother planet. When Adrianne sings “Please wake up,” she’s talking directly to the audience. “Attention is power,” she says. “I believe you can manifest something on the other side of the world just by using your power well.”

Engineer Don Monks and producer Andrew Sarlo, who were both behind U.F.O.F., capture the live energy as instinctually and honestly as possible. The journey of a song from the stage to the record is often a difficult one. Big Thief’s advantage is their bond and loving center as a chosen family. They spend almost 100% of their lives together working towards a sound that they all agree upon. A band with this level of togetherness is increasingly uncommon. If you ask drummer James Krivchenia, bassist Max Oleartchik or guitarist Buck Meek how they write their parts, they will describe—passionately—the experience of hearing Adrianne present a new song, listening intently for hints of parts that already exist in the ether and the undertones to draw out with their respective instruments. It is an honor to give life to these intricacies.

With raw power and intimacy, Two Hands folds itself gracefully into Big Thief’s impressive discography. This body of work grows deeper and more inspiring with each new album. While you listen, let your own two hands rest in front of your body with palms facing inward and see what power grows between them.

This show has been rescheduled from April 20 - All tickets honored

Crystal Bowersox, a northwest Ohio native currently calling Nashville home, has built her life around music. Crystal’s love for music developed at an early age from a need to find peace in a chaotic world. Through art and creation, Crystal was able to direct her energy and emotion, finding a way to mend a mind in turmoil. For her, music was always the most effective form of catharsis, and she would play for anyone, anywhere. In her own words, “my guitar was an appendage. I couldn’t live without it.”

Dead set on a career in music, Crystal moved to Chicago as a teenager, where she spent her days busking on subway platforms in between working odd jobs. While in the big city, she broadened her musical horizons and shared her talents with a variety of venues, ultimately auditioning for the ninth season of American Idol. Crystal’s time on the show proved to be well spent, as she immediately left the the soundstage for the recording studio. Since her introduction to the world through television, Crystal has released 3 LP’s, two EPs, several singles, and is currently developing an autobiographical, theatrical rock concert titled, "Trauma Queen". Additionally, she has used her talents to benefit several causes close to her heart, and has become an advocate and inspiration for people living with Type 1 Diabetes.

Similar to her beginnings, Crystal intends to make music that has healing power, but at this point, she sees far beyond her own troubles. Her live show is a safe space for concertgoers. Attend a Crystal Bowersox show, and you just might see a grown man cry and a child dance simultaneously. You’ll also likely get the chance to meet her personally; Crystal is typically the first one to arrive and the last one to leave the venue. Meeting with the fans and hearing their personal stories is something Crystal considers a blessing in her life.

By reliving her own painful moments in song, Crystal hopes to transcend that pain, lifting herself and her audience to a higher place. In the opening lines of “A Broken Wing” she sings, “I know there’s beauty in the burden / And even on my darkest day that sun will shine.”

A note about this tour, from Josh:
"I was thinking back to some of my favorite concerts over the years, and I realized how many took place in spaces that were special in their own right. Cathedrals, synagogues, strange and storied theaters, each bring a special kind of glow to the performance.

I was also feeling the urge to play some of my quieter, more narrative songs that I may not always get the chance to perform during larger rock shows.

So I decided to put together a tour that would allow me to play these songs, and some new ones that I’ve been writing, in some of these beautiful spaces. I decided to call the tour “A Book of Gold Thrown Open."

I'll mainly be solo, but it’ll be a fun chance to have a few special guests and accompaniment. And most of all, I’m looking forward to singing these songs.

I hope you can make it! Rock on, and thank you.
- Josh”
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Critical praise for Josh Ritter:

“Harking back to Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and maybe a little Mark Knopfler, Mr. Ritter has always been a slinger of serious ideas and high-flown imagery.” - The New York Times

“Josh Ritter remains at the top of his game two decades into a highlight-strewn career. He’d be forgiven for loosening his grip, but his hand has never felt surer.” - NPR Music

“If you love music and have a device on which to play it, you should listen to Josh Ritter whenever you need sound.”—Mary-Louise Parker in Esquire

“Mysterious, melancholy, melodic...and those are only the M’s.”—Stephen King in Entertainment Weekly

“There have been plenty of highlights in Ritter’s nearly 20-year recording career.” - AP

“Josh Ritter is sharper than ever.” - Salon

“100 Greatest Living Songwriters” - Paste

Best known as the frontman for the Walkmen, Hamilton Leithauser embarked on a solo career once that band went on hiatus following its 2011 album Heaven . Leithauser assembled a crack team of supporting musicians to work on his new material, including Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij, Fleet Foxes’ Morgan Henderson, the Shins’ Richard Swift, Dirty Projectors’ Amber Coffman, and his Walkmen bandmate Paul Maroon. Recorded at Los Angeles’ Vox Studios, Leithauser’s debut album Black Hours -- which was inspired by Frank Sinatra’s music and prefaced by the single “Alexandra” -- was released in May 2014.

Leithauser reteamed with Batmanglij for 2016's I Had a Dream That You Were Mine . Recorded at Batmanglij’s home studio in Los Angeles, the pair borrowed the best of their previous bands as well as ’50s and ’60s rock and soul with postmodern abandon. Hamilton’s forthcoming album (released date TBA), was entirely written, recorded, and produced by Hamilton himself. In his own words: “All of the songs on my new record are about people. Individual, real people. Some are strangers I’ve met, but a lot are friends.” The album is due sometime in 2020 through Glassnote Records.

Since his neo-psychedelic Green On Red days, Chuck Prophet has been turning out country, folk, blues, and Brill Building classicism. THE LAND THAT TIME FORGET is something different, a weather vane picking up signals from outer space – or maybe it's the Heartland.

Priced out of his beloved hometown, San Francisco, Prophet found himself re-energized in Upstate NY just a few miles from the Vermont border – and made a record that is much a 21st century exorcism as it is America.

The songs inhabit a world where a Fast Kid might be on the run from the truant officer or a handsy boss...or the Immigration Service. These are love songs that turn political on a dime (Love Doesn't Come from the Barrel of a Gun), and melodic hallucinations about kicking back in the Oval Office after hours "talking to my baby, saying baby, let's not fight."

Where else besides a Chuck Prophet LP are songs going to come at you from both the Tenderloin and an English roundabout, with stopovers in Nixonland and a love-struck mirror on a Saturday night while a workingman tries his Best Shirt On? With special appearances by the ghost of Johnny Thunders and Willie Wonka and John the Baptist and the train that brought Abraham Lincoln home one last time.

In Waving Goodbye, a young girl leaves small town attitudes behind to conquer the world one gig at a time. Then there's a dance Marathon, lost in time and reborn as a reality show. According to Womankind, men had their run, but it's over. (The good news is he can still try to sing his way into her heart.)

And it all leads up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue where a singer has his say, in two and a half loping verses and a middle eight.

Here's Chuck:

"Have any of you been to a 24-hour Walmart on the outskirts of Pittsburgh after midnight lately? It was just me and a couple tweakers roaming the auto parts aisles. We got along just fine. Long story short, I fixed that guitar by my lonesome and am playing it right now. I'm kind of proud of that."

"I will say this, though, about Ohio. Some of my truest hard earned fans are in Ohio. Go on and call it a fly-over-state, but not while Chrissie Hynde is in earshot, unless you want a vegan boot up your ass. All I'm saying is that a state is a lot more than which candidate won by how many votes. I mean you gotta feel sorry for the conservatives. The only songs they can play at their rallies without getting hit with a cease and desist order are by Ted Nugent and Charlie Daniels. And those two sure aren't shy about expressing their opinions."

THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT got off the ground in the Money Belt, only to find its legs in the Borscht Belt. Musically it has deep roots, from the Southern Delta to the discos of Munich. There's a kind of folkish inevitability to it, lots of acoustic instruments, on top of each other and side by side. But as much as folk music is the soil all music grows from, it never hurts to have a boiler room. So, there's always a rhythm section shuffling under your feet here.

Written mostly with longtime co-conspirator klipschutz, this LP steps out of Chuck Prophet's comfort zone ("two guitars, bass, and drums"). After nailing three tracks in S.F. with Grammy-winning alchemist Matt Winegar, Prophet confesses, "We hit a wall. Schedules. Money. Towed vehicles: a thousand large to get one van out of lockup."

So he went out on tour, a solo tour. Driving through the Catskills he dropped into Kenny Siegal's Old Soul Studios, in a "5-bedroom Greek Revival listed on the National Registry," Chuck and Kenny immediately began to argue. Over anything. Whether it was too hot or too cold (according to WHOM?). At the end of the day – "a very long day, three weeks of them – let's just say Kenny's the man. At Old Soul, musicians drop in, sometimes complete blind dates. We did everything live. The drummer gigs with Kevin Morby. The bass player, out of some jazz scene. Piano player, an honorary Bad Seed. A mish mash of personalities and styles. Turns out you can make a lot of noise with acoustic instruments, if there are enough of them."

When asked about his life, Prophet is candid and evasive all at once: "What do you want to know. Death, health issues, financial hijinks, I've had them all the past few years. We lost my dad and we lost Stephie's dad too. The basement flooded. My shoulder went out. I got hives over 80% of my body; was quarantined. The only break I caught was when the ear, eye, nose, and throat doctors were all in the same building. Oh, and I almost got killed about seven times in rented cars in snowstorms, lost on the way to gigs. Hey, maybe we should talk about songs instead."

New built to spill lineup features Melanie Radford and Teresa Esguerra.