LATE SHOW: Illiterate Light
– ALL AGES- STANDING ROOM ONLYILLITERATE LIGHTIlliterate Light has been stretching boundaries and upending expectations with a captivating blend of soaring indie rock, swirling psychedelia, and atmospheric folk that calls to mind everything from Neil Young and My Morning Jacket to Fleet Foxes and Band of Horses. Recorded with producers Adrian Olsen (Foxygen, Natalie Prass) and Vance Powell (Jack White, Kings Of Leon, Chris Stapleton), the record is blissful andecstatic, with a mix of raw electric guitars, propulsive drums, and shimmering harmonies that showcases the band’s remarkable live setup—Gorman plays guitar with his hands and synth bass with his feet, while his musical partner, Jake Cochran, plays a standup drum kit, which captures the scintillating energy that’s fueled their journey.Gorman and Cochran first met while attending college in Harrisonburg, VA, where they discovered a shared passion for sustainable living and community building. After graduation, they took over a local organic farm, spending their days tending crops and working farmer’s markets and their nights performing anywhere they could land (or make) a gig. Dubbing themselves the Petrol Free Jubilee Carnival Tour, the pair wouldoften tour the region on their bikes, sometimes joined by as many as two-dozen other cyclists and artists, performing at coffee houses, street corners, rock clubs, and off-the-grid communities.Hailed as “a perfect addition to your summertime playlist” by NPR, the band honed in on their distinctive sound and identity over years of relentless touring, earning dates along the way with the likes of Shakey Graves, Rayland Baxter, Mt. Joy, Rainbow Kitten Surprise, Futurebirds, and The Head and The Heart in addition to high-profile festival slots at Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Newport Folk, and more.DOGWOOD TALESOut of the Shenandoah Valley blossoms the debut album from Dogwood Tales Too Hard To Tell. Recorded at the Fidelitorium in North Carolina (Wilco, Avett Brothers, Mandolin Orange) on 2 inch analogue tape, this organic Americana/Alt-Country record hits like a contemporary take on Neil Young’s Harvest. In 2016 they released an EP and toured heavily building a strong fan base. This promising debut full-length is sure to expand on the solid foundation they’ve built over the past few years. Benjamin Ryan and Kyle Grim are the duo behind Dogwood Tales. They began playing together in high school and became friends playing in pop-punk bands in bordering towns. Naturally they cultivated a more roots oriented pallet, echoing the classic sounds of their home in the Valley. Their discovery of the great country duos of Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, Gram Parsons and Emmy Lou Harris and more recently Mandolin Orange gave them a broader view of the valley music they would set out to create. The Tales’ songs have a spiritual aspect that derives more from the Blue Ridge Mountains than the Church. Their lyricism grows out of a serious commitment to literature and specifically the Southern-Gothic canon. Too Hard To Tell carries the weighted stories and one-liners often found in the songs of American folk music with a special attention to tone and emotion. The songs speak of scenarios and heavy stations of life and death in small town America.
PATIO SHOW: Ivy Eld (Album Release Show)
– ALL AGES- LIMITED PATIO SEATINGIVY ELDIvy Eld’s music dances in the land of paradox. Her voice is simultaneously angelic and rawly human, fiery and red-wine smooth. Her evocative and tender songwriting invites listeners to dive in quickly and deeply, piercing weary hearts and enshrouding them with the fierce love and witnessing they desire and deserve. Her vulnerable, heartfelt lyrics soar through the air on the wings of her transcendent, soulful voice. A mental health professional for over a decade and a half, Ivy has been privy to the sacred inner worlds of thousands of souls (while navigating her own inner hallways, dark attics, and sun-lit living rooms). This rich interpersonal and intrapersonal experience and her curiosity about the internal landscape saturates her songs. She longs for her music to be an oasis of healing and beauty, a call to deeper respect and compassion for ourselves and for humanity, and also just some plain old fun for the ears. As a solo artist, her shows are intimate, playful, and deep. And when accompanied by her band, her songs become even more layered and potent with the backdrop of rich rhythms and moody, electric sounds. Ivy considers her music to be another facet of how she shows up in the world in authentic and passionate service— both as a musician and as a therapist. She hopes her thoughtful, earthy, poetic songs will inspire others to look inside—light, shadows, and all—and come home to their deeply worthy selves.
PATIO SHOW: Corey Parlamento & Claire Hoke
– ALL AGES- LIMITED PATIO SEATINGCOREY PARLAMENTOCorey Parlamento is a solo guitarist and songwriter living in Asheville, NC. His songs blend elements of traditional songwriting with more experimental and neo-classical compositions. Being heavily influenced by film music, Parlamento’s songs and performances are immersive in their instrumentation, allowing a world to be built around personal and abstract narrative.CLAIRE HOKEClaire Hoke is a singer songwriter born and raised on North Carolina land and music. She’s been performing around WNC since 2018 in various groupings and these days finds herself settling into playing her tunes solo. Drawing inspiration from artists like James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, and Sarah Jarosz, Claire weaves her innermost musings into the fabric of her fingerstyle and open tuning driven music. She uses songwriting to express things that are honest, uncomfortable, and sometimes left unsaid
PATIO SHOW: The Trusty Hucksters
– ALL AGES- LIMITED PATIO SEATINGTHE TRUSTY HUCKSTERSThe Trusty Hucksters are from North Carolina, Massachusetts, Florida, the Great Expanse of the Universe, and Under Your Own Bed. They crawl out and they beam down to perform that tasty Tango from Tartarus, that Swing Jazz from Alcatraz, that Mambo from Below. Throw in another dollar and you’ve got that Vaudeville from the Hills, a Rock and Roll Rigamarole that you can’t get at your local vegetable stand. Two for a buck, three for five dollars!
Brent Cobb & Hayes Carll Gettin’ Together
– 7PM DOORS / 8PM SHOW – ALL AGES- STANDING ROOM ONLYBRENT COBB and HAYES CARLL Acclaimed alt-country artists Brent Cobb and Hayes Carll are set to hit the road for a co-headlining tour kicking off at The Basement East in Nashville, touring throughout the Southeast and Northeast, and wrapping up in New York City at City Winery – Pier 57. The two road warriors are bringing a special edge to this run, though, as each artist will hit the stage to perform their own songs, before uniting after both sets to perform a one-of-a-kind collaborative concert during which they’ll swap stories about inspiration and life on the road. For Cobb, the run signifies a chance to link up with one of his favorite musicians on the planet. “Hayes is everything a true artist/songwriter ought to be in my book. Somehow, I’ve had the privilege of playing shows with him here and there over the years, but I’ve always hoped we’d be able to do something a little longer lasting. We’re gettin’ together to give ourselves as well as the crowds something that I believe we’ll all talk about for a while.” Carll concurs, adding, “Every time I listen to Brent, I’m reminded that there’s still some groove, soul, and sanity in this world. His songs hit their mark with a laid-back confidence and invite us to celebrate the good and shake hands after we work through the hard. He’s an extraordinary everyman, and that’s the kind of friend I like gettin’ together with.” Cobb is touring in support of his January 2022 release, And Now, Let’s Turn to Page…, which was made with legendary producer Dave Cobb in RCA Studio A in Nashville. Carll will be performing songs from his whole discography and, in particular, from 2021’s You Get It All. You Get It All — produced by Allison Moorer and guitar legend Kenny Greenberg. Together, the duo will showcase their singular country styles before uniting to prove the unending power of collaboration. Catch them in a city near you.
Ty Segall Solo Acoustic
ALL AGESSTANDING ROOM ONLYTY SEGALL The man in the tree has a guitar, he’s gonna sing. But the sun shining through the branches— are those rays yellow or hazy gray? What day is today? When are you not going to feel this way again? “Hello, Hi”: welcome in to a new room to play the styles and feels that lie under Ty Segall’s fingers, easing fresh air into acoustic space with an assortment of love songs flowering in righteous unconsciousness. Plaintive and wistful, but unafraid. Like rain washing away yesterday, “Hello, Hi” pushes open the door, inviting the new to pass through all the old shades and degrees of hot and cold. Dark paths turn off abruptly into absurd darkness, then wind back through the broken rocks, ecstatic again. Absurdity again. It happens everyday. “Hello, Hi” is expansively rendered by Ty, mostly by himself, at home. The isolation suits the songs: you’re only ever as “at home” as you are with yourself in the mirror. Ty’s acoustic and electric guitars and vocal harmonies layer self upon self, forming a spiny backbone for the album. Textures at once gentle and dissonant root the songs as they make their move: melodic arcs convulsing in doubt and bliss and rage. Busting out of the endless gridlock into open space, these spirits pass on through. “Hello, Hi”’s flickering awakening to this trip: the opening three tracks’ train of sweet and salty reflections, before the abrupt crunch of the title track electrifies the senses. Good morning’s turned to good mourning in nothing flat, but there’s still a way up from the doldrums, to try again. Why can’t it be just as simple as “Hello, Hi”? What to do with yourself when love triggers loathing? How many more times do you have to go back there again? Pulling at the scratchy wool threads of an old sweater favored for warmth, comfort, protection, rejection, denial, blindness etc, Ty Segall dives from a clear, open sky, down through the marine layer and the shimmering waves of all the years. Radiating from the same mind fields as Goodbye Bread and Sleeper, mixed with shard edges of contrast and contradiction from things like Freedom’s Goblin, Manipulator, and First Taste, “Hello, Hi” is Ty’s most relaxed and complete production to date, an ebb-and flow fusion of words and music offering abstraction and acceptance as it wrestles itself through a fucked-up time. Your life and what you make of it — throughout “Hello, Hi,” Ty Segall charts a passage through its enduring tangles honestly, with clarity and confusion. CHARLES MOOTHART Charles Moothart is an American multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter. He is best known for his collaborations with the garage rock musicians Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin. Moothart is the drummer for Segall’s current backing band, The Freedom Band. He was previously the guitarist for Segall’s backing band, the Ty Segall Band, and is the guitarist and vocalist in the pair’s hard rock project, Fuzz. Additionally, he is a member of Segall’s collaborative project with Ex-Cult’s Chris Shaw, GØGGS.
POSTPONED: PATIO: The Black Twig Pickers
– ALL AGES- PATIO SEATING IS FIRST COME FIRST SERVEDTHE BLACK TWIG PICKERSThe Black Twig Pickers are a group defined by their forward thinking approach to a type of music most often associated with times gone by. Over the course of eight full-length records, including collaborative releases with Jack Rose and Charlie Parr, a split LP with Glenn Jones, and numerous EPs and singles, the group has established itself as a collection of dedicated practioners of old time music re-cast and shaped by their appreciation of modern improvisation, drone, and punk. While not at odds with the experimental scene that has fostered them or the old time circles they travel in, The Black Twig Pickers thrive in the in-betweenness of those two worlds, proving that the exploration of the outmost bounds of sound and the exploration of decades old tradition and community aren’t as different as one might think.Rough Carpenters, which was recorded in the same two-day session as 2012’s Whompyjawed EP, can be seen as an inward-gazing foil to that EP’s long-form hoedown epics. With the addition of Sally Anne Morgan on fiddle to the trio of Mike Gangloff, Isak Howell, and Nathan Bowles, dance has become a more prominent part of the group’s formula. It wasn’t until Morgan joined the band that the band actually began to dance onstage. Also, on this album the group strays a bit farther outside their intensely local Southwest Virginia tradition than earlier records, incorporating a few more tunes with origins in Kentucky (“Banks of the Arkansas”) and West Virginia (“Little Rose”). The group’s repertoire is constantly growing as they turn to first-person sources, older musicians that were brought up in the old time scene and in some cases the children and families of deceased respected practitioners, and unreleased archival recordings passed among musicians. And while local and regional history is ever present in the music The Black Twig Pickers play, they turn songs that are many decades old into living artifacts, released from the restrictions of era by the personal convictions of the musicians.This spirit of ecstatic abandon is conveyed through the percussive elements of The Black Twig Pickers’ music and more importantly, through a spontaneity and an unrehearsedness the band wears as a badge of pride. As Gangloff explains, “It’s not the melody, it’s the moss.” The sharp twang of the banjo, a spontaneous holler, a foot stomping along in time, and other seemingly incidental sounds become all important. Like the band’s previous Thrill Jockey full-length Ironto Special, Rough Carpenters was recorded with absolutely no overdubs and in as few takes as possible. The Black Twig Pickers are indeed rough carpenters, building unpolished but finely crafted records that embody the spirit of a timeless old-time scene.Isak Howell — guitar, mouth harp, vocals Mike Gangloff — fiddle, banjo, vocals Nathan Bowles — banjo, washboard, bones, fiddlesticks, banjosticks, vocals Sally Anne Morgan — fiddle, hambone, vocals With Joseph Dejarnette — bass and vocals
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: 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.
PATIO SHOW: Night Teacher
ALL AGESLIMITED PATIO SEATINGNIGHT TEACHERNight Teacher is the project of lead singer-songwriter Lilly Bechtel, whose haunting voice and poignant lyrics have combined with the sensibilities of producer and multi-instrumentalist Matt Wyatt to create a world that orbits between experimental folk, electro-pop, and alternative rock. Music writer Robb Donker writes of the group’s most recent single: “Wyatt’s percussive tones sort of feel like they are improvised, as if the group found things around the house to play with, which is what (for me) persists in making their texture so organic and interesting… Bechtel’s vocal aesthetic works perfectly as a storyteller; there is at once a sage presence in her powerful lilt, but it is also one that feels broken- as hopelessness and hope play a fierce game of tug of war.” Since the 2020 release of their debut record Night Teacher, the group has won the Music With a Conscience Series, been featured onWomen of Substance Radio, and noted by the music magazine Relix as an “artist to pay attention to.”
