CANCELED: PATIO SHOW: Drunken Prayer
– ALL AGES- LIMITED PATIO SEATING IS FIRST COME FIRST SERVEDDRUNKEN PRAYER Drunken Prayer transcends the bounds of Americana music. Morgan Geer writes songs that could emerge from a highly blissed-out biker bar or a swampy ashram. The newest Drunken Prayer album is 2022’s The Name Of The Ghost Is Home. For the last year Morgan Geer has been working from his home studio in Asheville, NC with Paul Oldham (Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Royal Trux), building on tracks initially recorded in New Mexico at Empty House Studios, home of doom metal bands like OM and Sleep. The end result evokes an ominous Acid Western feedback-and-driftwood aesthetic. The latest Drunken Prayer releases have been 2019’s acclaimed LP Cordelia Elsewhere mixed by Mitch Easter (Let’s Active, REM) and the ambitious 17 minute long death-raga, Electric Daddyland from 2021. Over the past two years, before the pandemic, Drunken Prayer played hundreds of shows across 18 countries and across the US at venues such as the Newport Folk Festival, Pickathon and San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall. Geer’s music has been featured on AMC, NPR, WFMU and SiriusXM. On the side Geer is the lead guitar player for alt-country goths Freakwater and writes for different artists including the Brooklyn rock and soul phenom Bette Smith. Morgan has also been touring internationally, opening for and often joining the eccentric Handsome Family. Morgan Geer lives in Asheville, NC.
[CANCELED] PATIO SHOW: Aaron “Woody” Wood
Due to circumstances beyond our control, this show has been canceled and the refund process is already underway via ETix. – ALL AGES- LIMITED PATIO SEATING (FIRST COME FIRST SERVED) AARON “WOODY” WOODAaron “Woody” Wood is quite the renaissance man, embodying the energy and mystique of American music. Carved from the foothills of the Piedmont, rolled and tumbled through the Delta mud and washed in The Mississippi, Aaron “Woody” Wood is straight up Cosmic Appalachian Soul. With a background as diverse as his music he consistently delivers the soul, power and energy that have gained him renown as a musician’s musician. Aaron ”Woody” Wood continues to carry his art farther by giving attention and respect to the artists that have influenced and shaped his music, allowing him to keep that Spirit burning forward. Focusing on songwriting and new styles of guitar playing, Aaron ”Woody” Wood’s inventive approach to musical style and the raw emotion he delivers in his songwriting creates a cohesive sound that is hard to find but heavily sought ought by music lovers everywhere.
PATIO SHOW: Darrin Hacquard
– ALL AGES- LIMITED PATIO SEATING IS FIRST COME FIRST SERVEDDARRIN HACQUARDDarrin Hacquard writes songs that connect. He’s funny, tortured, melancholy, and joyous. Sometimes he’s all of these at once. It’s an uncanny gift for empathy. He can see characters for not just what they are, but what they hope to be. His sonic landscapes are as diverse as the lyrical subjects that populate his songs. From Old Time, to Psyche-Rock, to Country, to Spaghetti Western, Darrin builds stories in a way that only he can, and tells them with unflinching vision and kindness.
[CANCELED] PATIO SHOW: William Matheny
– ALL AGES- LIMITED PATIO SEATING (FIRST COME FIRST SERVED) WILLIAM MATHENYLet me tell you an anecdote about William Matheny. And no, this is not the 5:15 AM drive to the Albany Airport when we both were drinking Genesee beer and black coffee because we were both thinking correctly at that hour. More on that later. It was before I really knew William, but the moment when I knew that he was great. Envision: A punk rock club in Washington, DC, its inhabitants and paid customers. Who knows why and how he had been booked? A songwriter from Mannington, West Virginia stepping into the lair of upper-crust, judgment-packed DC punks with their Fugazi-leftover orthodoxies in their wildly provincial scene. He had fifteen minutes, a Vox amp, a telecaster and no one interested in the audience. I live in DC and I would have fled. There was a 10,000% chance that the next band up was going to have a spiel about gentrification and then play “angular riffs.” Billy — I can call him that, you can’t — played a solo set. He played loud. He played “Out For Revenge” and “29 Candles” and “Teenage Bones” and the other great songs which you may not have heard on his debut LP. Over the course of that short set he first brought that crowd to heel and then brought the crowd around. By the end the applause was thick and the appreciation unmistakable. He did it in DC. He can do it anywhere.But let’s talk about the other thing with the beers and the coffee and Albany. You need to know that William Matheny and I have been through some things together. We’ve seen parts of the world that I was sure existed only in Elmore Leonard novels. When I needed to pull over on the Cross-Bronx Expressway to throw up in a plastic trash bag, he was my driver and bag provider. We made it to the Bowery Ballroom an hour later for soundcheck and everything went great. William Matheny is the lead guitarist in my band the Paranoid Style, in addition to his other obligations. William Matheny is a man that makes things happen.William Matheny may be the best songwriter working, and is at a minimum the best songwriter you might have never heard of. For those who haven’t had that good fortune, let’s go, as Warner Wolfe used to say, to the videotape. Consider his 2018 standout single “Christian Name,” which is like Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down A Dream” if it had been “Runnin’ Down A Nightmare.”Over the past four years, he has assembled a wondrous catalog which situates itself amongst the indelible tradition of roots-rock misfits like Guy Clark and Lowell George, with just enough Jackson Browne-craft and Springsteen-triumphalism to make the thing potentially huge. You can’t talk about Matheny without talking about West Virginia, although it is sometimes true that he would prefer not to discuss it. Matheny is from Mannington, population smaller than your average small town. Like most of the state, Mannington fought on the side of the Union in the Civil War and represented a crucial strategic stronghold as one of the stops on the B&O Railroad. The correct side, not that it helped all that much. They say history is written by the winners, but in spite of upholding the Union, history was not written by Mannington. Heavy industry: logging and coal. An oil boom in the 1910s. Comfortable lives and then the Great Depression. Bankers and foreclosures. History was written by Mannington and then history was written on Mannington. That grand old feeling, indeed.
PATIO SHOW: Todd Baker
– ALL AGES- LIMITED PATIO SEATING IS FIRST COME FIRST SERVEDTODD BAKERTodd Baker is a singer-songwriter, producer, multi-instrumentalist, writer and actor based in Brooklyn, NY. Writing and performing steadily since the late 1990’s, Baker has served as either front-man, bassist, guitarist or drummer for multiple bands including, most notably, Fountain Project, the Wicked Hemlocks, Featherweight and his own eponymously named solo project. He has also scored commercial projects for companies such as Condé Nast and Big Star NYC. With six studio albums to his credit, Baker will be releasing a new E.P. entitled Vampires in the Fall of 2022. This will be his third solo release, the follow up to The Disaster Handbook (2010) and When I Die (2015).
Celebrating John Prine with The Knotty G’s
– ALL AGES- PARTIALLY SEATED SHOW THE KNOTTY G’S The Knotty G’s will be joined by some of the finest musicians from the “big ‘ole goofy” town of Asheville to celebrate the music and legacy of one of America’s most influential and beloved songwriters, John Prine, on his birthday, October 10th. This incredible lineup features Felix Pastorius on bass, Lyndsay Pruett on violin, Jackson Dulaney on pedal steel, Daniel Combs on organ and keyboards, Kent Spillman on drums as well as other special guests throughout the evening. The Knotty G’s- Gillian Francis H.E. Knott (vocals/guitar) and Charles Knott (vocals/guitar): The Knott’s goal is simple: to create music and an experience at their shows they feel is genuine. Gritty yet funky performances fuse with the band’s jovial nature and invite audiences to take part in the revelatory power of music while still managing to tap into plenty of fun. In the short time they’ve been a team, they have amassed an impressive list of stages and festivals, including: the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, The Blue Ridge Pride Festival, Strangecreek Campout, Wormtown Music Festival, and The Ladybug Festival. In December 2021, they released “Set Sail,” their first full length studio album recorded with award winning producer Matt Williams at The Eagle Room located just outside of Asheville. The album showcases genre jumping compositions tied together with the same singular soul-soaked thread that weaves its way through all of their music.
Hannah Kaminer & The Wistfuls: “Heavy On The Vine” Album Release Show
– ALL AGES- SEATED SHOW- LIMITED NUMBER OF PREMIUM SEATING TICKETS AVAILABLEHANNAH KAMINER Hannah Kaminer makes modern American roots music that blurs the boundaries between genre and generation. As a songwriter, storyteller, and producer, she nods to the Appalachian traditions of her native North Carolina while creating a contemporary sound that’s woozy, wistful, and evocative of the landscape where it was created. She turns a new page with her third record, Heavy On The Vine. Written and recorded in Kaminer’s adopted hometown of Asheville, it’s a reflective, resilient album that finds the artist making sense of her new world—a place where boutique hotels block the view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, childhood habits have given way to adulthood realities, and the Christian faith that once offered easy answers to life’s big questions has lost its magic. Heavy On The Vine isn’t just a soundtrack for Kaminer’s loss of faith; it’s a battle cry of hope and defiance, delivered by a songwriter who’s learned to live with uncertainty. “The idea of estrangement shows up everywhere,” says Kaminer, who kickstarted her career with 2015’s Acre By Acre and expanded her sound with 2018’s Heavy Magnolias. “These songs are about estrangement from myself, from family and old friends, from the Christian faith of my childhood, and from the world as I used to know it.” Kaminer’s world began taking shape in the small towns of western North Carolina, where she grew up singing hymns in church. Later, while living in central Texas as a college student, she heard a bluegrass song on the radio and found herself pining for the home she’d left behind. “I heard the banjo and thought, ‘That’s the sound of home!'” she remembers. “It took me moving halfway across the country to realize how much I gravitated toward those sounds.” Those sounds took her back to North Carolina, where Kaminer settled in Asheville and found a supportive musical community that prioritized collaboration over competition. “It was a great place to try something different,” she says. Inspired by Gillian Welch, Iris DeMent, and Patty Griffin—three artists who nodded to the old-school folk singers who came before them, yet still made modern music that balanced gorgeous melodies with grit, hard truths, and haunting arrangements—she started writing her own songs. The Grammy-winning audio engineer Julian Dreyer became one of her earliest champions, engineering her 2015 debut album and co-producing its 2018 follow-up. By the time Kaminer began writing material for Heavy On The Vine, though, she’d become more than a sharp songwriter. She’d started to think like a producer, too.THOMAS KOZAKThomas Kozak’s writing pulls myth and religion through the split-open skull of an obsessive-compulsive, anchoring the past to a new body and giving it voice through and beyond the conventions of folk and Americana.
Margo Cilker
– ALL AGES- SEATED SHOWMARGO CILKER MARGO CILKER is a woman who drinks deeply of life, and her debut record Pohorylle, released in November 2021 on Portland label Fluff and Gravy, is brimming with it. For the last seven years, the Eastern Oregon songwriter, who NPR calls one of “11 Oregon Artists to Watch in 2021,” has split her time between the road and various outposts across the world, from Enterprise, OR to the Basque Country of Spain, forging a path that is at once deeply rooted and ever-changing. As Pohorylle traverses through the geography of Cilker’s memories—a touring musician’s tapestry of dive bars and breathtaking natural beauty—love is apparent, as is its inevitable partner: loss. For what bigger heartbreak is there than to be a fervent lover who must always keep moving? Cilker seems keenly aware of the precarious footing upon which love stands, and at many turns, the record circles something that is staggeringly beautiful and slipping away. “I am a woman split between places,” Cilker sings on the album’s wistful closer, touching for a brief moment upon the vast dichotomies of her selfhood and her profession, and the negotiation that she conducts between them. “I’m just very inquisitive. I’m a very curious person. Why are things this way? Do they have to stay this way? You know, how can things change?” Cilker asks. It is this part of her nature that expands Pohorylle into the complex journey that it is: her ability to crack open a moment of desperation and lay it out on a table to catch a careful light. Pohorylle, which carries gentle nods to Lucinda Williams, Townes Van Zandt, and Gillian Welch, shines under the instincts of producer Sera Cahoone, whom Cilker first came across in 2019 while planning her first full-length. “I was trying to pin down what kind of sound I wanted and stumbled across a video of Sera and just loved how she performed. I then listened to her last studio record and thought, that’s the sound.” Cilker says. “I found out Sera had produced that record herself with John Askew. My friend put me in touch with her and she liked my demos enough to produce the album. It felt very auspicious—It was truly just a gut feeling.” Cahoone quickly got to work assembling a first-rate band: Jenny Conlee (The Decemberists) on keys, Jason Kardong (Sera Cahoone, Son Volt) on pedal steel, Rebecca Young (Lindsey Fuller, Jesse Sykes) on bass, Mirabai Peart (Joanna Newsom) on strings, Kelly Pratt (Beirut) on horns, and the album’s engineer John Morgan Askew (Neko Case, Laura Gibson) on an array of other instruments. The record also prominently features effortless harmonies from Sarah Cilker, Margo Cilker’s sister and frequent touring partner. Over the last six years, Margo Cilker has toured extensively across the US and internationally, and is a staple in the independent festival circuit. (written by Maria Maita-Keppeler)GABE LEE Nashville-based songwriter Gabe Lee is becoming increasingly known for his ability to detail the intricacies of everyday life, the small distinctions that leave some on the fringe and others in the mainstream, and the particulars that stick around long after a lover leaves.
Bob Dylan’s 82nd Birthday Celebration: Hosted by George Trouble and The Zealots
– ALL AGES- SEATED SHOW- LIMITED NUMBER OF PREMIUM SEATING TICKETS AVAILABLEGEORGE TROUBLE AND THE ZEALOTS CELEBRATE BOB DYLAN’S 82ND BIRTHDAYThe Zealots and friends will pay tribute to Bob Dylan ahead of his 82nd birthday at the Grey Eagle, Sunday, May 21st at 7pm. To salute the work of one of the most influential and complex artists of our times, the Zealots are drawing from their roots. Asheville based singer/songwriters and rockers George Trouble and The Zealots, with special guests, bring their exuberance, strong craft and diverse range of styles to the Dylan songbook, promising a night of celebration. Wear your leopard skin pill box hat!
WellSpring: Album Release Show
– ALL AGES- SEATED SHOW- LIMITED NUMBER OF PREMIUM SEATING TICKETS AVAILABLEWELLSPRING Molly Hartwell and Laura Boswell of WellSpring met in early 2019 at a brewery in Asheville, NC where Laura was performing at a songwriter’s event on International Women’s Day. Both accomplished singers, songwriters, and performers in their own right, they quickly discovered a mutual love of folk music and duo-centric, harmony-driven songs. In their own words… ”Finding our voices in harmony was like slipping on the most well-worn, comfortable pair of jeans; as natural as if we’d been doing it forever. Our singing chemistry seemed to have a life of its own and before long a committed collaboration began, deepening immensely during the onset of the pandemic and throughout 2020. We sang with no purpose but for the joy of it and to find our voices in the delicious dance of harmony that is so healing all in itself. We sang through hard days and better days, we sang to the neighbors and we sang to the birds. Mostly we sang to our own hearts, to help ourselves through the hardest year.” After sharing a few of these songs on social media, they quickly gained a loving and loyal following that requested (demanded!) more music from them. Seeds were planted for a recording project and in 2021 they launched a successful crowdfunding campaign to record their first full-length album. With the help of their amazing supporters, producer & engineer Daniel Shearin (River Whyless), and nearly a dozen exquisitely talented local musicians, WellSpring brought this album to life at Asheville studios Citizen Vinyl and Sleeping Dogs. Self-titled, the album memorializes the full spectrum of emotion that the first year of the pandemic contained, celebrates artists of many genres and eras, and has a couple of originals thrown in for good measure. Molly and Laura reside in Asheville where they plan to continue recording, writing, and sharing their music wherever there is a home for it. They look forward to premiering their album at The Grey Eagle with a full band that includes Bill Berg & Zack Page. ZACK KARDONZack Kardon is a multi-instrumentalist and song-writer that has been living in Asheville for the better part of a decade. As a sideman Kardon has collaborated with notable artists such as Indigo De Souza, The Dead Tongues and Midnight Snack. Kardon’s own music has a gentle intensity to it. He writes songs that look inward, rooted in a belief that the best way to touch upon the universal is to take a magnified glass to ones own experience. Kardon’s songs don’t seek to explain or preach, but simply, capture the essence of a feeling before it disappears into the ether.
