Darren Nicholson Band
– ALL AGES- SEATED SHOW- LIMITED NUMBER OF PREMIUM SEATING TICKETS AVAILABLEDARREN NICHOLSON BAND A GRAMMY nominee and winner of 13 International Bluegrass Music Association awards, Darren Nicholson has taken his own brand of mountain music around the world. A regular for years on the Grand Ole Opry out of Nashville Tennessee, and a founding member of acclaimed bluegrass group Balsam Range, Darren now spends his time recording, writing new songs, and performing. You can catch Darren almost every week sharing the music he loves somewhere, traveling both nationally and internationally – as a solo artist, with his own Darren Nicholson Band, or in collaboration with other musicians. With new music on the way, Darren is booking now for the 2023 season and beyond.
Mia x Ally
– ALL AGES- STANDING ROOM ONLY- LIMITED NUMBER OF VIP MEET & GREET TICKETS AVAILABLE, INCLUDING: – One Admission Ticket – Exclusive Merch Bundle – Photo Opportunity – Early access to music room MIA X ALLY‘Mia x Ally’ is the electrifying duo project of electric violinist Mia Asano and bagpiper/multi-instrumentalist Ally the Piper. With a combined following of over 6 million people, both musicians officially joined forces in April 2022. Playing both original songs and covers of pop rock and metal music with a Celtic twist, Mia x Ally made their debut in Boston in August of 2022, playing two sold-out shows, and later went on to tour the East and Midwest on the “Shipping up to Boston tour,” selling over 3000 tickets. The two are working on their first full-length album, releasing in October 2023. Both from classically trained backgrounds, they share a dream of showcasing the vast range of their instruments, bringing them to the forefront of metal, rock, and pop music. Recognized by Metallica, Dragonforce, and The Charlie Daniels band for covering their music, this duo is turning heads and shaking up the industry, with a live show you won’t want to miss.
OUTPOST: Phuncle Sam
– ALL AGES- STANDING ROOM ONLY- RAIN OR SHINE- FREE SHOWPhuncle Sam is Asheville’s own Dead-Centric “jam band”. Since their formation in 2004, Phuncle Sam has been firmly rooted in musical exploration. The band serves up inventive interpretations of Jerry Garcia, Grateful Dead, and many others. They have built up a faithful following by using an approach that respects the improvisational traditions of The Grateful Dead, while exploring what can happen when individual band members bring their unique influences and interpretations into the mix.
OUTPOST: The Old Futures
– ALL AGES- STANDING ROOM ONLY- RAIN OR SHINEThe Old Futures are an indie rock band based in Asheville, NC. Their live show consists of a deep catalog of original material with a few classic covers to keep everyone groovin’! The quartet is a versatile group that draws inspiration from Indie, Blues, Pop, and Americana stylings to name a few. Don’t miss out on this exciting fun new band in the Asheville Scene.
Greg Koch ft. The Koch Marshall Trio
– ALLAGES- SEATED SHOW- LIMITED NUMBER OF PREMIUM SEATING TICKETS AVAILABLEGREG KOCH FEATURING KOCH MARSHALL TRIOMilwaukee native Greg Koch has forged a successful career as “a guitar player’s guitarist.” He is not only a fiercely creative player with a whole trick bag of impressive techniques, ranging from Albert Lee chicken-pickin’ to Albert King string-bending to all-out Hendrixian abandon, he is also is a clinician for Fishman Transducers and his wildly popular “guitar test drive” videos (4,000 to date) for Wildwood Guitars of Louisville, Colorado have generated 50 million views. Koch also has a signature axe which was released in 2019 by Reverend Guitars, named the Greg Koch Signature Gristlemaster. The guitar colors were given somewhat humorous names like: Kochwork Orange, and Blucifer. He is also a best-selling method book author and video instructor for music publisher Hal Leonard and a contributing columnist for a variety of guitar magazines including Guitar Player. Guitar great Steve Vai, who released Koch’s 2001 album The Grip on his own Favored Nations label, heaped praise on his fellow guitarist: “Greg Koch is one of those rare guitarists that can blend various styles with a light-hearted approach and a tremendous amount of technique. Hearing him play is inspiring to a guitar player to try to achieve greatness on the instrument.”Dylan Koch gravitated to the drums early on in his life using kitchen utensils to play along with music as soon as he could walk. After digesting an early diet of Ginger Baker, Keith Moon, Mitch Mitchell and John Bonham, Dylan was mentored by the legendary Tom Brechtlein (Chick Corea/Robben Ford). In high school, Dylan participated in the Jazz Institute at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music and furthered his studies at the McNally Smith School of Music in the Twin Cities. While still in his teens he performed with young guitar guns Tallan Noble Latz and Jared James Nichols and has performed alongside his father with such artists as Robben Ford, Little Feat’s Paul Barrere, Jon Cleary, David Grissom, Roscoe Beck and Malford Milligan. Dylan was recently nominated for drummer of the year by the Wisconsin Area Music Awards (WAMI). Says proud papa Koch, “This is the third official recording with the kid. And what’s great about it is, you can’t teach the grease. And he gets it. He gets the filth. I guess he’s just got my filthy DNA.”Hailing from the Twin Cities area, Toby Lee Marshall came from a musical family, playing piano for years until falling under the spell of the sound of the organ while at a baseball game at age seven. His fascination for the Hammond B3 took hold after his Dad took him to see Steve Cherewan playing with Dr. Mambo’s Combo during their legendary residency at Bunker’s in Minneapolis. Steve mentored Toby in the ways of the B3 and he hit the ground running, landing a gig with bluesman Lonnie Brooks while still a teen. He would go on to travel the world as a member of Bernard Allison’s band. Following a long hiatus from music, Toby has returned to the music scene with a vengeance in the smoking Koch Marshall Trio. “Toby had actually retired from music,” Koch explained. “He decided to stop touring for several years to help raise his two young kids. But now he’s so excited to be playing in this trio because it’s just such a perfect format for him to let his freak flag fly. It’s the perfect combination of this kind of churchy, bluesy, funky, jazzy, rock, chicken-pickin’ thing, and he fits right in.”
Nick Shoulders and The Okay Crawdad: “All Bad Tour”
– ALL AGES- STANDING ROOM ONLYNICK SHOULDERS AND THE OKAY CRAWDADAll Bad, the latest album from Nick Shoulders, ultimately encapsulates everything that makes Shoulders’ inimitable form of country music so vital: a heady balance of dazzling musicianship and punk defiance, coupled with gritty eccentricity and a generational connection to the roots of the genre. With a singing style inherited from his family’s vocal lineage, Nick’s songs achieve the rare feat of imparting difficult truths while inciting a certain joyful abandon, balancing a sound forged by years of hard travel with a heartfelt reverence for the origins of country music. In the spirit of Hazel Dickens and Jimmy Driftwood, the incisive yet wildly jubilant All Bad vocally objects to the reckless destruction of the natural landscape and development run rampant, while still offering plenty of joy and dance-ready rhythms. Spanning a variety of early country styles, the album’s infectious harmonies shine alongside everything from jangling cajun waltzes to surf-rock infused bluesy ballads–all tied together by a voice seemingly out of place in this century, yet ever ready to speak up about its problems.Released via Gar Hole Records (a label founded and co-owned by Shoulders), All Bad marks the first LP made with his longtime band, the Okay Crawdad, since 2019’s premier full-length Okay, Crawdad and their subsequent pandemic-imposed hiatus. After writing most of the album from the front seat of a tour van, the Fayetteville, AR-based musician and bandmates Grant D’Aubin (harmonies/bass), Cheech Moosekian (drums) and Jack Studer (lead guitar) recorded the album in a home studio on the banks of the Mississippi River with New Orleans collaborators Ross Farbe and Sam Doores.Surrounded by a singing style passed down from a time before microphones, Nick’s childhood of bird call whistles and an over-exposure to southern gospel music eventually steered him toward an adolescence drumming for metal and punk bands, and subsequent years as an active illustrator and member of Arkansas’s heavy music scene. After numerous personal calamities and a growing obsession with the rural musical traditions of his lifelong home, Shoulders left the Ozarks and lived out of his van, singing on the street corners of the west while slowly being drawn to the vibrance of the New Orleans dance and busking world. After forming in early 2018, the ‘Okay Crawdad’ band flourished briefly in the wildly talented south Louisiana alt-country scene, culminating in the release of ‘Rather Low’ by the popular YouTube channel Western AF, catapulting Nick’s songs to a vastly wider audience right as Covid-19 and lockdowns ensued. Since then, a rapid ascension into the world of touring music has seen Nick playing alongside the likes of Sierra Ferrell and at major festivals such as Stagecoach. With the hard rhythms and heavenly melodies of their newest release, All Bad, the band manages to concoct a body of work that is at turns sublimely freewheeling and profoundly illuminating, yet primed to permanently warp the listener’s perspective to glorious effect.RIDDY ARMANArman has traveled across the country — from the farmlands of the Midwest to the bustling streets of New York City — writing songs, working as a ranch hand, and practicing an Agrarian lifestyle.
MJ Lenderman + Pile: Burial Beer’s Burnpile Afterparty
– ALL AGES- STANDING ROOM ONLYMJ LENDERMAN MJ Lenderman is a songwriter born and raised in Asheville, North Carolina. The anatomy of an MJ record might go something like this: warped pedal steels and skuzzed out guitar; a voice reminiscent of the high-lonesome warble of a choirboy. Songs snake their way from a lo-fi home recording to something glossier made with longtime friends at Asheville’s Drop of Sun studios, but the recording setting doesn’t seem to matter much — at its core, a Lenderman song rings true. These are stories about everything from a relationship disintegrating outside the high-end butcher shop to a sighting of football star Dan Marino at the local Harris Teeter; from a love song built around a t-shirt kiosk at the airport, or the malaise of a grill rusting in the rain. And those are just some of the things you might find across his three solo records: MJ Lenderman (2019), Ghost of Your Guitar Solo (2021), and break-through acclaimed studio debut, Boat Songs (2022). Lenderman’s songwriting is simple and true, stories delivered with a loping, easy vibe — a shrug of the shoulders, off-the-cuff guitar riffs fuzzy, a tangle of pedal steel and rock ‘n’ roll distortion culminating in alt-country cacophony. An MJ Lenderman song feels like a postcard from a hazy memory, the unpredictable bits and details that end up sticking — bird songs from the rafters of a hardware store, a real good Bob Dylan cover — and what make a story whole.PILE “I want to do what makes me feel like a kid: experimenting, having fun, and trying to discover new things about this work,” says Pile’s Rick Maguire about All Fiction. It’s his band’s eighth record, and one that finds the ambitious group assembling its most texturally complex material yet—despite the fraught inspiration underscoring its restive lyrics. Alongside the blistering drums and scorched-earth riffs that first galvanized Pile’s dedicated fanbase, the band has incorporated elegiac strings, mystifying vocal corrosions, and haunting synths. From the creeping fear of cinematic opener “It Comes Closer” to the euphorically ascending keys on ego-shattering closer “Neon Gray,” All Fiction is an ornate, carefully paced study on the subjectivity of perception, the data-shaping despotism of big tech, and the connections between anxiety and death. In its most vital moments, it’s also a resolute recommitment to the restorative significance of art and imagination. For fifteen years, Pile’s evolving take on rock has earned the group one oft-repeated superlative: “your favorite band’s favorite band.” Ceaseless touring took its members from Boston’s basement circuit to international festivals, hitting loftier technical apexes with each new record. Maguire—the fastidious composer, evocative guitarist, and potent voice behind the solo-turned-punk project—gives musical body to his interior world in scream-along-able lyrics that skew surreal. Drummer Kris Kuss’s time-defying performances, layered over gnarled basslines, have garnered widespread acclaim.PREWN
OUTPOST: Hot Brown Smackdown
– ALL AGES- STANDING ROOM ONLY- RAIN OR SHINEHot Brown Smackdown”A dynamic, high-energy newgrass band hailing from Louisville, KY. Known for their electrifying live performances and unique sound, the band combines traditional bluegrass instrumentation with elements of rock, jazz, and funk to create a sound that is both avante-garde and timeless. Over the years Hot Brown Smackdown has earned a reputation for their impressive musicianship, infectious energy, and complex compositions. With a lineup consisting of Arthur Geissler on drums and vocals, Patrick Schroering on mandolin and vocals, John Blum on banjo, Ellie Ruth Miller on fiddle, Justin Cecil on bass, and Anthony Le on guitar, the band has become a fixture in the Appalachian music scene. With the release of their self-titled album in 2021, the band established themselves as one of the most exciting bands in the circuit, delivering a newgrass-fusion sound that is all their own. Since then, the band has continued to evolve and hone their craft, releasing two new singles and is currently mid-production on their sophomore album. In addition to their studio recordings, Hot Brown Smackdown is best experienced live, where their captivating performances and improvisational skills are on full display. Whether playing to a packed field at a music festival or a small club, the band always packs a punch, combining brightly textured, hard-driving, POWERFUL bluegrass polyphony with high-energy groove and soul.”
Back to School Family Show with The Billy Jonas Band
– ALL AGES- SEATED SHOW- EARLY SHOW BILLY JONAS BAND Fun for All Ages! The Billy Jonas Band loves to engage and delight both young and adult audiences. Whether performing for adults, families, school groups, faith communities, or a mix, they strive for a musical excellence that inspires, entertains, and moves people literally and figuratively. With “wild winded word magic” (Dirty Linen Magazine), homemade “industrial re-percussion” instruments, exquisite 3 and 4 part vocal harmonies, plus guitar and bass, they love to create community through song and story. Their specialty: finding and pushing your “wonder” button.In 2010, the Billy Jonas Band was honored with a performance at the White House!
BJ & BJ (Billy Jonas & BJ Leiderman)
– ALL AGES- SEATED SHOW- LIMITED NUMBER OF PREMIUM SEATING TICKETS AVAILABLEBILLY JONAS Some ask: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Billy Jonas asks: “What is the sound of 600 sets of keys jingling on the downbeat? And how shall we inspire the audience to do it?”For over thirty years, Billy Jonas — performer, singer-songwriter, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and educator — has perfected the art of the neo-tribal hootenanny* with audiences around the globe. Using voice, guitar, and industrial re-percussion,* each concert is a soul-spelunking, heart healing, joy-filled journey.“It began around an evening campfire in the summer of 1972 — Leaving on a Jet Plane and Blowing in the Wind rising with the sparks into the darkness… communal singing, guitars strumming, and a bucket thumping the back beat. 40 summer campers and 8 counselors became one big, glorious, harmonizing being. I remember thinking: wouldn’t it be great to carry this ecstatic connectedness, and musical magic out into the world?” – BillyBilly developed his craft in the late 1980‘s as a founding member of the Oberlin College Big Bang Theory performance art collective. He refined things further in Chicago during monthly “Bangalong with Billy” shows at the No Exit Cafe, and subsequently in the 1990‘s as a co-founder (with Bill Melanson) of the funky folk* duo The Billys.He currently tours with the Billy Jonas Band, with Abraham Jam (Muslim-Christian-Jewish trio), and solo. The Billy Jonas Band was honored with an invitation to perform at the White House in 2010.Jonas has received numerous honors and awards, including an American Federation of Independent Musicians 1st place/Gold, multiple Parents Choice Golds, and a New York Times “Best” listing.*BJ LEIDERMANBJ Leiderman is the award-winning composer of some of the best known theme music on Public Radio. For over five decades, Leiderman’s melodies have graced programs including Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, Marketplace, Science Friday, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! and the “Stump The Chumps” theme from Car Talk. Leiderman, who now lives in Asheville, has been touring the country on behalf of Public Radio member stations.BJ will be performing original songs from his debut album entitled “BJ” as well as some of his favorite cover tunes. As always, he will include the crowd-pleasing medley of his most popular Public Radio themes. So be sure to reserve your tickets now. “A splendid time is guaranteed for all!“ PLUS… Billy Jonas After Dark BandThe FunDadaMentalists
