The Brudi Brothers
Mom+Pop Music recording artist, beloved musicians, songwriters, and poets, The Brudi Brothers, today announce a fall tour including headlining shows and cities in support of Wyatt Flores and 49 Winchester and release a live cover of one of the most mysterious folk songs ever written, “House of the Rising Sun”. Originally a traditional folk ballad dating back to the 19th century, “House of the Rising Sun” has been recorded in many forms — from early Appalachian versions in the 1930s, to Bob Dylan’s acoustic interpretation, to The Animals’ 1964 arrangement that reached audiences worldwide. The Brudi Brothers’ version draws on this history while adding their own interpretation. When introducing the song on tour, the Brudi’s give respect and honor to the song: ”So Lead Belly recorded this one with his wife, He’s our favorite and then Dave Van Ronk copied the song…then Bob Dylan copied him…and Bob Dylan got copied by…The Animals and so he couldn’t do it after that so it’s been stolen so we’re stealing it now.” “This song has always resonated with us—it’s one of those pieces that carries the weight of history and heartache,” said Johannes, “It is a song full of mystery but also so accessible. We recorded it live in Denver, Colorado, honoring the song’s legacy while making it our own.” The Brudi Brothers fall multi-city tour starts in their hometown of Seattle on September 3, opening for Wyatt Flores and then hitting many US cities including Sacramento, Chicago, Atlanta, Austin and New Orleans, among many others. They are hosting a fanclub presale on Tuesday morning using the code MOTHERLAND with the general onsale happening on Friday, 8/22. The Brudi Brothers signed with Mom+Pop, and their viral song, “Me More Cowboy Than You,” a quirky and cheeky track, amassed colossal attention with sudden virality across social platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Music, with over 1.4 billion views and 60 million streams. On “Me More Cowboy Than You,” the irreverent lyrics poked fun at the “cowboy craze” that is sweeping pop culture, a sentiment that resonates with many including this verse: “The boys and girls are acting real strange, pretending they’re welders and cowboys and such, buying old work gear from the exchange, but you can tell their hands don’t do very much, Saying me me me me me more cowboy than you!” The Brudi Brothers have amassed loyal fans who come to see them play live throughout the Pacific Northwest and California. The Brudi Brothers finished their summer tour opening for Grammy Award-winning roots artist, Sierra Ferrell. YouTube | Instagram | Bandcamp | Facebook | Spotify
Don Was and the Pan-Detroit Ensemble – “Blues For Allah” 50th Anniversary Show
Music has always loomed large in the life of Don Was. Born in Detroit in 1952, he has enjoyed a multi-faceted career as a musician, record producer, music director, film composer, documentary filmmaker, and radio host. Since 2011, he has also served as President of America’s venerated jazz label, Blue Note Records. As a record producer, he has won six Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year in 1989 for Bonnie Raitt’s Nick of Time and Producer of the Year in 1994. Albums he has produced have sold close to 100 million copies for a wide array of artists such as The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, John Mayer, Ringo Starr, Wayne Shorter, The B-52s, and Charles Lloyd. In 1995, he produced and directed the Brian Wilson documentary I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, which won the San Francisco Film Festival’s Golden Gate Award. As a film composer, he received the 1994 British Academy Award (BAFTA) for Best Original Score for the film Backbeat. He also won the 2014 Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Direction for CBS’s The Beatles: The Night That Changed America. In 2018, Don joined Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir to form the Wolf Brothers, a band that continues to tour in the U.S. and overseas. In April 2023, he served as Music Director for Willie Nelson’s 90th birthday celebration at the Hollywood Bowl, and he is featured in the Willie Nelson & Family documentary on Paramount+. In September 2024, he was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Americana Music Foundation at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. He also hosts Dinner With Don Was, a weekly radio show on John Mayer’s SiriusXM Channel 14. At Blue Note Records, Don fiercely protects the label’s 85-year-old legacy, meticulously preserving its revered catalog of Black American Music. His work includes overseeing acclaimed vinyl reissue series such as Tone Poet and Classic Vinyl, as well as signing and producing many of the label’s current artists, including Robert Glasper, Charles Lloyd, Wayne Shorter, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Gregory Porter, and Jason Moran. Don’s deep Detroit roots keep him closely tied to the city. For the past 15 years, he has music-directed and played bass in the Don Was Detroit All-Star Revue, part of Detroit’s annual diversity festival, the Concert of Colors. From 2009 to 2012, he hosted The Motor City Hayride on SiriusXM’s Outlaw Country channel, and since 2021 he has co-hosted The Don Was Motor City Playlist, a live weekly show on Detroit’s NPR station WDET-FM. Don is also the voice of Neville the Dog in the hit Amazon Prime Video children’s series Pete the Cat. THE PAN-DETROIT ENSEMBLEDon Was’ latest group, The Pan-Detroit Ensemble, features top-tier jazz musicians from his hometown. “There’s a unique sound and feel to Detroit that permeates the music in a way that resonates all over the globe,” says Was. “There’s a rawness, a lack of pretension, and an unmistakable underlying groove that reflects the people and culture of the entire city.” The band includes longtime collaborators such as Blue Note artist Dave McMurray on saxophone and Eminem’s Oscar-winning collaborator, keyboardist Luis Resto. Website | Facebook | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube
Eliza McLamb – Good Story Tour
It appears to be a trophy at first. Look closer, and you’ll see the cover of Good Story features Eliza McLamb holding a makeshift award, hot-glued together from scraps she and her mother salvaged. It is, of course, silver — a self-deprecating wink introducing the timbre of McLamb’s sophomore album. These last few years, McLamb’s been parsing her upbringing, the songs she wrote about it, and the whole endeavor of the stories we tell about ourselves. “If you get really good at telling the story of who you are, you become the story you told instead of the ever-dynamic, ever-changing person you have to be,” McLamb says. “I did really well telling the story of who I am, but I began asking: What’s the point of it?” At only 23, McLamb has already lived multiple lives. In her late teens, McLamb found success via co-hosting the podcast Binchtopia and sharing songs on TikTok. She soon pulled back from the platform, feeling it didn’t represent her actual ethos as a songwriter. Instead, she signed to Royal Mountain and released her 2024 debut Going Through It, a document of a complex, traumatic childhood that led to searching phases — dropping out of college during the pandemic in favor of working on Midwest farms, eventually leaving her North Carolina hometown behind for Los Angeles. It all gave her plenty of stories to tell on Going Through It. And now on Good Story, she wonders how that process affected her. Yet the homemade trophy of Good Story’s cover is far from a jocular consolation prize alone. It’s a symbol of the layered, accomplished writing McLamb arrived at as she interrogated everything she thought she was about as an artist. After touring Going Through It in the spring of 2024, McLamb began writing new material and found herself encountering an age-old trope. “I felt like I had spent my whole life writing the first record,” she says. She could’ve mined her experience for a whole catalog of music, but she wanted to step back and reassess her impulses as a writer. Good Story directly reflects upon the process of making not only Going Through It, but the process of making art derived from our personal lives altogether. “I carved out room and brought in new songs that felt fresher, able to pick up on ideas outside of this compulsion to build a personal narrative,” McLamb explains. Then, she laughs: “But then I wrote all these songs about the compulsion to make a personal narrative.” Though Los Angeles had served her well for a time, McLamb had begun to feel suffocated by her life there. “I was on a personal mission to stop being so solipsistic,” she cracks. It led to another cross-country move to New York City. She found herself reinvigorated by being in a dense city colliding with so many different people. She fell into new scenes — music circles, but also literary crowds. Inspired by her new surroundings, McLamb’s writing process changed too. Songs arrived to her while on the subway, or on walks near her apartment. Once she had enough material, McLamb reconvened in upstate New York with guitarist Jacob Blizard and illuminati hotties’ Sarah Tudzin, who had produced Going Through It. A greater sense of confidence allowed McLamb to open herself up to co-writing. Before Going Through It, McLamb had never played with a band. Bandcamp | Instagram | YouTube | Spotify | Bandcamp
Ryan Davis + The Roadhouse Band
New Threats from the Soul is a masterclass in reducing the sublime to the prosaic, immensity to infinitesimally, and vice versa (the trick can only work both ways). Everything in our universe is essentially flotsam or jetsam, rubbish heaps of fragments and shards. We, especially, are jerry-rigs of bubblegum and driftwood, inconsistencies and incoherencies, dead dreams and necrophagous hopes. The record functions in parallel with Kafka’s winking dictum that there is an infinite amount of hope in the universe, just not for us. New Threats suggests that maybe, just maybe, something like redemption is possible, but only once we’re entirely emptied out and hawked in toto down at Walden Pawn. Next month, the Roadhouse Band will play a handful of dates in the Midwest and South, with a robust UK and EU tour to follow. Today’s newly announced dates will bring the band to additional cities in the South and Midwest, as well as cities on the West Coast. A full list of dates is available below. “New Threats from the Soul [is] a beautiful and wildly smart record about making do in an upside-down world.” — Amanda Petsurich, The New Yorker “If you don’t know it yet, it’s my privilege to tell you that Ryan Davis is one of the greatest songwriters of his generation.” — Nathan Salsberg Website | Instagram
Shelagh Bella, Owen and the Smokes, The Band Juniper
Shelagh Bella Owen & The SmokesThe Band Juniper
Chezile – Wish You Were Here Pt 2 Tour
Alejandro Sanchez, better known as Chezile, has had the kind of overnight success that would give anyone whiplash. After 2023 psych-pop single “Beanie” went viral on TikTok, giving Sanchez 1.6 million monthly listeners in under two months, he went from living out of his car in Los Angeles to getting calls from labels. A sensitive soul, the Albuquerque-born multi-instrumentalist and child of Mexican regional musicians is now based in San Diego, where he’s hard at work on a full-length debut. After 47 garnered an audience for a sentimentality melded with reverberated guitar, an austere indie rock caught somewhere between Tame Impala and Cigarettes After Sex, Chezile kept digging inward. Life now forever changed by his circumstance, he centered himself in childhood explorations skateboarding through the desert landscape of New Mexico in Alē. The EP’s self-referential nature sees Chezile’s nickname —pronounced like the skateboard trick— give an underlying warmth to the music, the kind of feeling one would get flipping through a scrapbook years later when, upon reflection, one is living a completely different moment. “[47] was a tough time of my life,” he says of his last EP. “I think this next project, in comparison, has a lot of elements from my childhood, and tackles trying to deal with the music industry while maintaining that inner child, that little Ale.” Compared to 47, Alē is a hug rather than an echo of melancholia. The title track and lead single, driven by a piano-run and Chezile’s voice, sees him reminiscing on childhood comforts and struggles, through memories of broken air conditioners and skating through patches of brown grass. “Kev’s House” sees him channel an old friendship, and “Hotel” makes a metaphor of the thousand eyes now on him. He leans into his sentimental strengths on tender love song “Wya”, with vocals that call to mind Frank Ocean’s “White Ferrari” begging you to come closer and really listen. How does one honor their original intentions while balancing what is at stake, especially while making art? How does an artist stay true in the age of viral trends and fleeting fancies? Chezile grapples with these questions through centering the biographical on Alē, the emotional vantage point that’s made his name focused on the kid from humble beginnings dealing with the trappings of fame while trying to stay grounded in the storm of his new reality. It remains in the world of 47, attempting to make sense of it while coming to terms with the present. “I’m nothing special,” Chezile reflects on the making of the new EP and his virality. “I overly manifested this since I was young. If I’m able to do it, I know for a fact that people can do the same thing I’m doing and whatever they want to do. I somehow want to convey that message through art and be a tool to help kids who were as fucked as I was, people who don’t have influences around them to just tell them that they’re fucking special.” Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube | TikTok | Spotify
The Runarounds – The Minivan Tour
Website | Instagram | YouTube | TikTok | Spotify
School of Rock Chapel Hill’s End of Season Showcase
Free Show / $10 Suggested Donation 12:00 – Doors Open12:30 SHOW12:30 – The Music of New Orleans!1:30 – Guardians of the Galaxy’s Awesome Mix!2:45 – Songwriting!3:45 – Pop Queens!4:45 – Senior Send-Off Ceremony5:00 – Red Hot Chili Pepper’s “Californication”!6:00 – Punk! Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Facebook Event
The Jins
The Jins have been on a tear for the last decade, bringing their fusion of incredible riffs, bombastic drums, and driving basslines to fans first in Vancouver, and then across Canada and the US. Ben Larsen, (guitar vocals) Hudson Partridge, (Bass) and Jamie Warnock (drums/vocals) got the ball rolling in 2014 in the living room of a shared house. This music was not destined to remain in the living room however, and soon the Jins were playing stages both in Vancouver, and then across Canada, with a self-produced EP and Album along the way. The hard work paid off in 2019 when The Jins were noticed by Vancouver indie label 604 Records, and an EP was soon in the works with producer Dave Genn (Matthew Good Band, 54-40). The resulting EP featured the runaway hit “She Said” (14M+ streams on Spotify) and the eponymous “Death Wish.” In 2022, The Jins returned with a vengeance and once again hit the local scene with songs that they had kept in the vault. The indie rock smoothness of “Metro”, the air punching anthem of “Stay Please”, and the garage rock cool of “Effigy”, the pieces came together that would become 2023’s “It’s a Life” LP. While not afraid to show their influences, one can hear the weight of Sabbath, the harmony of the Beatles, the echoes of Smashing Pumpkins, all wrapped in their unique swagger and humour. When the three-piece hit the stage, you are in for one thing and one thing alone, and that’s a spectacular show. The songs take on new life and become barrelling avatars on the shoulders every rock band stands on. The crowd moves, sways, jumps, and screams to the beck and call of the instruments and vocals as a wall of sound crashes over you, just to recede and hit you once again. In between guitar changes and Larsen’s trademark banter, The Jins achieve one thing on every song they play and every time they take the stage- sheer passion, and the one goal of bringing everyone together for a good time. Website | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Spotify | Bandcamp
Hege V, Secret Monkey Weekend, Michael Kelsh
HEGE VChapel Hill’s Original Rural Rockin’ / High Octane HillBilly Band, who Barnstormed their way to MTV w/ the “Burial Ground of The Broken Hearted” Music Video off their critically acclaimed “HOUSE OF TEARS”, Mitch Easter-produced album in 1987!!! That summer, they toured the USA in a 1965 Cadillac Hearse dubbed:”The Hearse of Tears Tour”. Hege (the Man aka George Hege Hamilton V) moved to NashVegas in 1988 to deal w/ their struggling record label and write more songs of “Pain & Misery” for SONY and CURB Music thru the 1990s & 2000s. He helped establish the “Americana Music” scene in Music City, while becoming a World-Travelin’ Troubadour — Releasing 9 albums to-date in Europe & Australasia and Pickin’ & Singin’ in 22 Countries on 5 Continents, so far. Website | Facebook MICHAEL KELSHMichael Kelsh cut his teeth in the Chapel Hill music scene while attending UNC, where he fronted “Jack and the Cadillacs” and performed with “Southern Culture on the Skids”. After releasing two solo albums, “Ghost Dance” and “Steel Blue Ballads”, Michael relocated to Nashville, where he has since collaborated with Music City Legends: Singer/Songwriter Rodney Crowell; “Poco” Co-Founder Rusty Young; John Cowan of “New Grass Revival”; Producer Bill Halverson (Cream, Neil Young, Texas Tornadoes…) and more, releasing his acclaimed album “Well of Mercy”. Along the way, Michael’s shared stages w/ Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, Warren Zevon, Richard Thompson, Doc & Merle Watson, Buddy Guy, Johnny Winter, Eric Anderson and NRBQ. *Michael Kelsh’s most recent Album on CD & Vinyl is “Harmony Sovereign”. Website SECRET MONKEY WEEKENDA family band like no other, Secret Monkey Weekend returns with sparkling sophomore album Lemon Drop Hammer on June 6. Comprising seasoned guitarist/vocalist Jefferson Hart and his stepdaughters Ella (bass/vocals) and Lila Brown-Hart (drums/vocals), the North Carolina trio’s harmony-heavy Beatles/Squeeze songwriting, charming lyricism, and familial chemistry is channeled into 10 tracks helmed by revered REM/Smithereens producer Don Dixon. “I wasn’t prepared for Jefferson’s tremendous talent as a writer, player and singer,” said Dixon. “These three individuals have combined to make something I love [and] grown, literally and figuratively, in front of my eyes.” Secret Monkey Weekend (a name derived from a vintage Tiger Beat magazine headline) began as purely organic family therapy, with no plans for anything more. Yet by 2016 they were playing casual shows and soon graduated to a busy calendar of club and festival dates. Debut album All The Time In The World, also produced by Dixon, followed in 2022. It’s a tale so remarkable that the trio is the subject of Emmy-winning 2023 PBS documentary, Secret Monkey Weekend. Website
