Carrboro Music Festival Hip Hop & Grooves Showcase
‘Hip-Hop & Grooves’ Showcase presented by Carrboro Music Festival & Cat’s Cradle! Join us for our annual Hip-Hop & Grooves Showcase at the Carrboro Music Festival!! 😃🙌🏾🎹🎷🎤🎵✨ This all-day event will feature talented local Hip Hop and multi-genre artists from across North Carolina. If you’ve been to one of our showcases before, you know you’re in for a great time with amazing live music! Don’t miss out on the good vibes and unforgettable performances! 😎🤙🏾🎶 FEATURING PERFORMANCES BY:Cypher – 2:00Shambo – 2:30Jamaal Matters – 3:00Turnabout Players – 3:30Donovan Harrell – 4:00T.I.M.E. – 4:30DJ Reimei – 5:00.zone – 5:30Sarah Kaboom – 6:00ABNormal Music Group – 6:30Essi Sings – 7:00Henry Cole – 7:30SAKY – 8:00MayDayGLO – 8:30DrewShamir. – 9:00SkyBlew – 9:30 Sounds provided by: Truck Willis & Navo The Maestro Website
Carrboro Music Festival
With Warka, The Auxiliary, Deacon Orb Weaver, Winfield, Scrape, Slow Teeth Established in 1998, the Festival was originally held on June 21st as an official affiliate of the Fête de la Musique, which is also known as ‘Make Music Day’. The purpose of the event was to make all genres of music more accessible to the public through free concerts where all performers donated their time. As the Carrboro Music Festival was eventually moved to a cooler Fall date, the official relationship with ‘Make Music Day’ came to an end. More recently, the Carrboro Music Festival has been an effort to host a free one-day event (plus a kickoff show) that showcases Triangle-area performers and the varied musical styles they represent. While performers in prior years received t-shirts and food vouchers in appreciation for volunteering their time in the same spirit as the Fête de la Musique, groups who are officially selected will now receive paid compensation in the form of an honorarium. The event is a product of a coordinated effort by the Carrboro Recreation, Parks, & Cultural Resources Department and the Carrboro Music Festival Planning Committee. This program is supported by the Town of Carrboro and the Carrboro Tourism Development Authority. Generous support is also provided by the local business community. Please visit the sponsorship page for a complete list of sponsors. Website
Carrboro Music Festival Kickoff: Dawn Landes & Chessa Rich
Dawn Landes is a North Carolina-based singer-songwriter whose music you might have heard if you watch The Good Wife, House or Gossip Girl. Along with releasing seven albums and five EPs since 2005, she’s a frequent collaborator with contemporaries such as Sufjan Stevens, Norah Jones and composer Nico Muhly. She has appeared with the Boston Pops, the NYC Ballet and on the TED main stage. Her musical ROW about fellow Kentucky native Tori Murden McClure’s quest to become the first woman to row across the Atlantic Ocean premiered in 2021 at Williamstown Theatre Festival and is available on Audible. Her latest release is The Liberated Woman’s Songbook, an album of folk songs that leads us through a history of women’s activism from the 1800’s through the high times of Women’s Lib in the 1970’s. The album was produced by her longtime collaborator Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman) and features guests including Emily Frantz (Watchhouse, formerly Mandolin Orange), Kanene Pipkin (The Lone Bellow) Charly Lowry, Rissi Palmer and Lizzy Ross (Violet Bell). Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube I’ve been a vivid and frequent dreamer my whole life,” says Chessa Rich. “I feel that my dreams are a) the portal to my truest well of creativity and image-making and b) sometimes the most fun part of my day.” However, sleeping and dreaming do not always peacefully coexist. Or at least not for the North Carolina-based Chessa Rich, who wrote the shadowy and aquatic Deeper Sleeper about the years she spent living with an undiagnosed sleep disorder that dramatically influenced her relationship to sleep, productivity, dreaming and creativity. “Each song on this record reflects a different aspect of my relationship with sleeping and dreaming,” said Rich. “Some were born in frustration and anger at a body that won’t do what I want it to do, others sound more like giving up, and one is a literal retelling of a dream I had.” Recorded at Milan Hill in March 2021, Deeper Sleeper is the narrative of finally waking up. It showcases her informed rule-breaking songwriting steeped in a past not only of musical collaboration and performance, but of a gentle persistence to discover oneself amidst a vibrant landscape of others. The nine tracks divulge—in Rich’s distinctly seasoned sound—the heartfelt importance of having mindfulness of those closest to you. Across the LP’s sonic landscapes, Rich finds herself in various states of consciousness. Sleeping but unable to wake up, awake but wanting to be asleep, dreaming but not aware of the pieces that form the whole. “All my dreams leave me with a specific, unique feeling, but they rarely have linear narratives that I can follow to lead me to a nice tied-up moral or lesson,” said Rich. “I have to sit with them and let them accompany me throughout my day, letting my brain’s images be what they are. Pieces of the songs on Deeper Sleeper have been floating around with me like dreams for a while, and like dreams, I had to patiently sit with them to let them become what they needed to be.” Bandcamp | Instagram | Facebook
Sam Burchfield & The Scoundrels
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Ashley Kutcher – Thanksgiving Break Tour 2024
Ashley Kutcher is a Baltimore-born singer, songwriter, and artist. In 2019, Kutcher performed countless gigs in local bars in between attending college for nursing. Gaining traction with original music online, she answered a TikTok comment with “Love You From A Distance.” After taking over TikTok and inspiring millions of creatives, the song exploded to the tune of over 95mm Spotify streams to date and paved the way for her first two EPs: One Eighty and Survive My Own Mind. In their wake, she sold out her first two headline US Tours. Ashley released her debut album “House on The Water” in January 2024, and has released two singles this summer from her upcoming project. Ashley’s unreleased music is a return to her roots as an acoustic singer/songwriter, marrying hard hitting hooks with a more organic & country influenced sound. Ashley will be on the road in November for her fourth US headline “Thanksgiving Break” tour. Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | TikTok
The Strumbellas
Ever since forming in 2008 and releasing their debut album, 2012’s My Father and the Hunter, two-time JUNO award-winning alternative group The Strumbellas have steadily released follow-ups containing every ounce of stomping, hand-clapping, alt-country gusto, from 2013’s We Still Move on Dance Floors to 2016’s Hope to 2019’s Rattlesnake. They’ll soon round the corner with a brand-new fifth studio album, Part Time Believer, a collection that signals The Strumbellas’ grand return and rebirth. Now with Jimmy Chauveau on board as lead vocalist, The Strumbellas spent the last four years writing, recording, and whittling 50 songs down to 12. Honed by producers Ben Allen (Gnarls Barkley, Kaiser Chiefs), Keith Varon (Machine Gun Kelly), Stevie Aiello (30 Seconds To Mars), and Dave Schiffman (RHCP, The Killers), Part Time Believer continues The Strumbellas’ long-standing tradition of blending anthemic, brightly coloured compositions with yearning, contemplative lyrics. “I think people often feel like things are escaping them, or they’re trying to grab on to something — happiness, gratitude, professional or personal goals — and for some reason, they just can’t get there,” says David Ritter, who handles piano, organ, percussion, and vocals. “Even if they get the thing they want, it doesn’t feel the way they thought it would. A lot of these songs are about trying to, like, figure out why we’re all feeling this way, and how we can find more peace in our lives.” Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | TikTok
Ken Vandermark PNL Duo
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Harvey Street
Formed in the summer of 2021, Harvey Street quickly became a staple of the North Carolina music scene. Described as “disciplined electricity,” their original songs such as “Irish Goodbye” and “Betty” became instant favorites in their hometown of Raleigh, NC. With the release of their debut EP “Gone for a While,” Harvey Street cultivated a sound that resonated with music-goers all over the Southeast. With sold-out shows playing alongside Futurebirds, The Stews, Arcy Drive, and many more under their belt, the band embarked on their first Southeastern tour in January of 2024. With their new “Great Escape” EP and summer 2024 tour, Harvey Street is steadily expanding further on the sound and fan base that they’ve developed over the past 3 years. Website | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube | TikTok
The Staves
It was in December 2022 that The Staves celebrated the 10th anniversary of their debut album Dead & Born & Grown – a strange and beautiful period in the lives of sisters and band members Jessica, Camilla and Emily Staveley-Taylor, making their fourth album All Now with the same organic vulnerability as that first record: except now everything was different, and they kind of were too. All Now emerges, bold and bright, from a period of quiet, which followed a period of chaos, for the band. When Good Woman was released in 2021, to positive reviews, it felt like “an echoing silence” to share such a cathartic album with a world shut down. So The Staves had to retreat, again, and actually wrestle with everything they had been through. “There was a delayed reaction to trauma and these big changes out of your control,” says Jess of the period that came after Good Woman, as the band – like the rest of us – were forced to sit with their thoughts, but also still processing the death of their mother and other seismic changes: Emily takes a backseat on this album (while still contributing vocals on a handful of tracks) to focus on motherhood, while Camilla reckoned with her own mental and physical health issues – chronic pain and a series of operations due to Endometriosis began to take an increasing toll. “It all culminated in making me feel extremely alienated,” says Camilla. “Suddenly your body is doing something completely out of your control – depression reared its ugly head again and it sparked an identity crisis. It was a turning point.” So The Staves did what they know how to do best, and got back to writing. The idea was to go against most of what they’d been doing for the last few years by going back to basics and focusing almost solely on each other and their guitars as a starting point. It began with Jess, navigating this new landscape by harnessing her creativity on her own at first in the studio in Hackney at the end of 2022, slowly luring Camilla back to the next chapter of The Staves, before reaching out to super-producer John Congleton (Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen), who the band had worked with on Good Woman, to help them figure out the next step in the studio. “After this feeling of slow motion for a couple of years, it suddenly accelerated wildly towards the finish line,” the band say of the weeks that follow: packing up and heading to LA to meet Congleton and musicians Max Hart and Tamir Barzilay to bring to life what this next album really could be. The result? An album as rich and honest as all the most profound music by The Staves scattered across albums for the last decade, calcified here into something special. There’s the buoyant nostalgia on ‘After School’, a love letter to Emily from her little sisters “looking back on the simpler times” and reflecting on those teenage days shuffling into that one bedroom with the CD player to play the new Sheryl Crow album. “That late ‘90s period was just fucking fun,” says Camilla. “We thought Emily was the coolest, so we thought we may as well go full throttle with a really joyful song.” Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
The Hourglass Kids, Bongfoot
The Hourglass Kids began as a group of high school friends jamming in various basements of North Carolina. Over time, they have evolved into a seven-piece reggae-jam-rock collective known for their mind-melting live performances. Pulling from the musical creativity of all seven members and the unique lyricism of four songwriters and vocalists, The Kids traverse a breadth of stylistic and emotional terrain that includes roots reggae, psychedelic rock, hip-hop, and jazz-rock that has cemented their place in the Carolina roots music scene. Website | Instagram | Facebook | Spotify
