Jordy Searcy
In 2020, after Jordy Searcy made a name as a homegrown touring act and a landmark songwriter for his generation, he left Nashville behind and hopped into his touring-van-turned-camper and drove to the west coast. The 2022 album Daylight is the sound of that uncertain adventurous time, surfing up and down the west coast, writing songs in remote outdoor locations in solitude for weeks at a time and touring the country with friends. All of that changed in February 2022 when he met his now-wife, Michel Janse. A previous album titled “UFO” had been written, recorded and scrapped, because jordy found a new direction-The End Of Us. The End Of Us is an album about endings and beginnings-the end of the adventure a single musician in his 20’s discovering the world and taking risks, and the beginning of building a life with the person you want to spend it with. The end of relentlessly chasing a career in a music city, and the beginning of a quiet creative life in the small beach town of Oceanside, CA where jordy now lives. For his wife Michel, this record also has special meaning-this is her 2nd marriage, and the record explores her story and her healing process. Enlisting the help of longtime friend and hometown buddy Phillip Vo to write and produce, this record is energetic, California summery, Beatlesy, and fresh organic pop all in one. Relying on craft, inspiration, and fun, “The End Of Us” is a no-skips good time. “Everyone’s life has little endings, its one of the only things you can rely on. For me, it doesn’t matter what you leave behind when something ends, its what you build going forward. That’s what this album is about-allowing yourself to become a new person, with a new person. I can’t wait for people to hear these songs!” Website | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
The Palms
With a new album on the way, arguably their best work to date, 2024 looks to be a career defining year for The Palms. It’s time the world gets their ears on California’s best kept secret.Started in Los Angeles, CA in 2015, The Palms have become a formidable player in today’s Independent musical landscape. With their signature California sound, an underground modern-day classic in “Push Off,” and an ever growing and beloved fan base and catalogue, they’ve generated 100’s of millions of streams, all while retaining 100% ownership, independence and remaining loyal to their DIY ethos.”The Palms have shifted toward creating music that is as catchy as pop, yet melded with poignant elements of blues, hip-hop, rock, and reggae. Rothbard’s distinct vocals also invite the listener into each track, allowing the duo’s intended messages to come through while simultaneously leaving space for individual interpretations.” – Interview MagazineInstagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | TikTok
Six Organs of Admittance
With Time is Glass, Six Organs of Admittance is captured once again in the intricate tangle of the fretboards, soaring in open skies above. Like lens flare cutting through the speakers; spiderwebs cracking the windshield that holds back all the onrushing reality. Blowing the dust away, cutting a new path for cognition. As is always endeavored….After 20 years of living on the road in different places, Six Organs of Admittance had returned home to Humboldt County — a far country, to some, but still part of the world through which creatures of all kinds are moving through and contributing to. And some of them are human. Alone together — forming connection and exchange out of thought and expression — no different from the people on the other side of the Redwood Curtain. It was there, where Six Organs had long ago emerged, in the name of everything cycling, of circles that spiral concentrically and remain unbroken, the new music was conceived. In moments, it was as if the future had some-how wrapped around 360 degrees; elsewhere, the systems and patterns inside the writing and recording only became evident later — like a recognition that cumulus and nimbus clouds which passed through the sky the day before contained familiar shapes. Informing the songs accordingly as he went, Ben picked up on modes both musical and lyrical, threading backward through the time of Six Organs of Admittance. Almost marinating in it as a way of life. Working on the music and the vocals, then spending some time with them while stepping away from them. Walking the dog and coming back to them. Time is Glass is made of that kind of time. Alone time.Recorded in the visceral environs of home, Time is Glass is sharply focused, even as misty impressionist mountains float through the background. Sweet and spiny, “The Mission” sings its purpose, before turning abruptly to the orchestral rumble of “Hephaestus”: rural industrial psychedelia, ecosystem goth, synths arcing to lift a helplessly earthbound community into the firmament above. Winding almost imperceptibly back into song with “Slip Away”, the time of the record becomes clear, moves fluidly, relaxed but aware, from event to event. People and things coming around again. The intuit, passing through wormholes and time, sounding deep then dissolving into the universal. The acoustic sounds ringing, layered suddenly, then clear again. Explosions of a new kind of distortion. Ecstatic melodies. Communing. The space of a day. The space of a season. Time is Glass, and Six Organs of Admittance is here and will be here, again.Website | Instagram | Twitter
Summer Salt
This June, trop-pop outfit Summer Salt—formed around the duo of singer/guitarist Matthew Terry and drummer, multi-instrumentalist Eugene Chung—will release their fifth LP, Electrolytes, via their new record label AWAL. Produced by Carlos de la Garza (Paramore, Ziggy Marley, The Linda Lindas), Electrolytes’ first single “Poolside,” drops March 29th. “‘Poolside’ is a song about being there for your significant other, and not forgetting the romance as time goes on,” Terry and Chung explain. “It is a song about love and being emotionally available and reliable in a relationship. Reassurance that you’re there for each other at the end of each day. This song was inspired by sunny days spent by the pool, date nights on rooftops under the stars, and the drive to always win together in any situation regardless of what others think.” Electrolytes follows 2023’s Campanita, the band’s breezy, blissful, and intimate monument to love, family, and everything in between. Electrolytes is another bold step forward in Summer Salt’s skyward career arc, marking the band’s first LP created with touring members Winston Triolo and Anthony Barnett. This all began a decade ago, when Chung and Terry moved to Austin to start on this journey, and years of hard work and an increasingly dedicated cult fan community have combined to bring Summer Salt to this moment. The new record is packed with short, to-the-point pop goodness. Crackling with presence and confidence, the 7 tracks sway and stroll through different moods and expressions. While so much of our time and energy is spent wondering how to achieve happiness and find our perfect place, Electrolytes suggests that maybe we’re already living in it. “Electrolytes is an admiration of our lives, as-is,” say Terry and Chung. “Each song is a theme in our adult lives and how we navigate the realness of it these days, just trying to be our best.” All of the tracks connect with both the deep-breath feeling of being outdoors, and the eternal importance of partnership, though sharp, contrasting experiences of these things streak through the record. A walk in the woods on “Deja Vu” brings back the wonderment of childhood, and “Bottleneck” weighs the experience of being depended on by a family even as you feel vulnerable yourself. And while “Ribbons” and lead single “Poolside” evoke a real picture of love at home, “Hand in Hand” tugs at the struggle for both the band members and their partners of maintaining that love life from afar. After 10 years of making music, Summer Salt plan to make 2024 their biggest year yet. In addition to the new LP, later this year they’ll celebrate the 10th anniversary of their debut release, Driving to Hawaii, with a US headline tour beginning in the fall. A band that began in bedrooms, playing for family and friends, has grown into what is now a welcoming and blossoming culture of devoted and widespread fans, a symbiotic community that gives life back and forth to one another. Summer Salt can’t wait to continue building this community with a year of celebration and plenty of new music.Website | Instagram | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
Clem Snide
“The last ten years have been a rollercoaster of deep despair and amazing opportunities that somehow present themselves at the last possible second,” says Eef Barzelay. “During that time, the band bottomed out, I lost my house, and I had to declare bankruptcy. The only way to survive was to try to transcend myself, to find some kind of deeper, spiritual relationship with life. Once I committed to that, all these little miracles started happening.” ‘Forever Just Beyond,’ Barzelay’s stunning new album under the Clem Snide moniker, may just be the most miraculous of them all. Produced by Scott Avett, the record is a work of exquisite beauty and profound questioning, a reckoning with faith and reality that rushes headlong into the unknown and the unknowable. The songs here grapple with hope and depression, identity and perception, God and the afterlife, humanizing thorny existential issues and delivering them with the intimate, understated air of a late-night conversation between old friends. Avett’s production is similarly warm and inviting, and the careful, spacious arrangement of gentle guitars and spare percussion carves a wide path for Barzelay’s insightful lyrics and idiosyncratic delivery. “I look up to Eef with total respect and admiration,” says Avett, “and I hope to survive like he survives: with total love for the new and the unknown. Eef’s a crooner and an indie darling by sound and a mystic sage by depth. That’s not common, but it’s beautiful.” Named for a William S. Borroughs character, Clem Snide first emerged from Boston as a three-piece in the early 1990’s, and the group would go on to become a cult and critical favorite, picking up high profile fans from Bon Iver to Ben Folds over the course of three decades and more than a dozen studio albums. NPR highlighted the Israeli-born Barzelay as “the most underrated songwriter in the business today, with a sneakily firm grasp on poignancy and humor,” while Rolling Stone hailed his songwriting as “soulful and incisive,” and The New Yorker praised his music’s “soothing melodies and candid wit.”Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube
James McMurtry (Solo)
This is a seated show. In James McMurtry’s new effort, The Horses and the Hounds, the acclaimed songwriter backs personal narratives with effortless elegance (“Canola Fields”) and endless energy (“If It Don’t Bleed”). This first collection in seven years, out August 20, 2021 on New West Records, spotlights a seasoned tunesmith in peak form as he turns toward reflection (“Vaquero”) and revelation ( closer “Blackberry Winter”). Familiar foundations guide the journey. “There’s a definite Los Angeles vibe to this record,” McMurtry says. “The ghost of Warren Zevon seems to be stomping around among the guitar tracks. Don’t know how he got in there. He never signed on for work for hire.” The Horses and the Hounds is a reunion of sorts. McMurtry recorded the new album with legendary producer Ross Hogarth (John Fogerty, Van Halen, Keb’ Mo’) at Jackson Browne’s Groovemaster’s in Santa Monica, California, a world class studio that has housed such legends as Bob Dylan (2012’s Tempest) and David Crosby (2016’s Lighthouse) as well as Browne himself for I’m Alive (1993) and New Found Glory, Coming Home (2006). McMurtry and Hogarth first worked together 30 years ago, when Hogarth was a recording engineer in the employ of John Mellencamp at Mellencamp’s own Belmont Studios near Bloomington, Indiana. Hogarth recorded McMurtry’s first two albums, Too Long in the Wasteland and Candyland, for Columbia Records and later mixed McMurtry’s first self-produced album, Saint Mary of the Woods, for Sugar Hill Records. Another veteran of those three releases, guitarist David Grissom (Joe Ely, John Mellencamp, Dixie Chicks), returns with some of his finest work. Accordingly, the new collection marks another upward trajectory: The Horses and the Hounds will be McMurtry’s debut album on genre-defining Americana record label New West Records (Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, Lucinda Williams, John Hiatt, Aaron Lee Tasjan, Buddy Miller, dozens more). “I first became aware of James McMurtry’s formidable songwriting prowess while working at Bug Music Publishing in the ’90s,” says New West president John Allen. “He’s a true talent. All of us at New West are excited at the prospect of championing the next phase of James’ already successful and respected career.” McMurtry perfectly fits a label housing “artists who perform real music for real people.” After all, No Depression says of the literate songwriter’s most recent collection, Complicated Game: “Lyrically, the album is wise and adventurous, with McMurtry — who’s not prone to autobiographical tales — credibly inhabiting characters from all walks of life.” “[McMurtry] fuses wry, literate observations about the world with the snarl of barroom rock,” National Public Radio says. “The result is at times sardonic, subversive and funny, but often vulnerable and always poignant.” His lauded storytelling — check out songs such as “Operation Never Mind” and “Ft. Walton Wake-Up Call” on The Horse and the Hounds— consistently has turned heads for decades now. “James writes like he’s lived a lifetime,” said John Mellencamp back in 1989, when Too Long in the Wasteland hit the Billboard 200. “James McMurtry is one of my very few favorite songwriters on Earth and these days he’s working at the top of his game,” says Americana all-star Jason Isbell. Website | Twitter | Facebook
Mel Melton & The Wicked Mojos
A North Carolina native, Mel went to Lafayette, Louisiana in the summer of 1969 to visit a college friend and play a little music before going back to UNC. His plans changed when he became totally immersed in the rich culture and physical beauty of southwest Louisiana. He moved permanently to Lafayette at the end of the summer and began playing in a band he co-founded with Sonny Landreth, the Louisiana slide guitar-playing superstar. To help support his new musical career, Mel took a series of jobs in the best Cajun restaurants in the city and discovered a new talent and another part of Cajun lifestyle, Louisiana cooking. Over the next few years he honed his musical and cooking skills, eventually becoming a well known Cajun chef. At the same time, he was becoming known as a singer and harmonica player specializing in a zydeco style of harp playing that has become his trademark. Mel arrived in Austin, Texas in 1972 at the start of the Austin music scene. He took a job at a BBQ joint near Lake Travis as a dishwasher, but eventually moved up the ranks to cook. The restaurant happened to be a hang out for several European chefs who worked at the resorts situated on Lake Travis and Melton was offered a cook position at one of them. While there, he joined Austin’s Chef Association and after several years, became chef at the Tarry House, a private club frequented by many Texas luminaries such as Walter Cronkite, Tommy Lee Jones, Sissy Spacek, and many Texas politicians including the Governor, who held a weekly staff lunch at the club. In the early 80’s Sonny and Mel formed the band “Bayou Rhythm”, adding C.J. Chenier to the lineup. The band headlined shows nationally and also opened shows for a number of legendary musicians including: Ray Charles, B.B. King, Dr. John, The Neville Brothers, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Dave Edmonds, and The Fabulous Thunderbirds. During his time with Bayou Rhythm, Mel was challenged to a gumbo cook-off by Rockin’ Dopsie at the 1986 American Music Festival in Chicago. The event was so well received that Melton decided to always cook for the band’s gigs and his peerless Cajun cooking quickly become a signature twist to his shows. In 1986, Melton left Bayou Rhythm and moved to Chicago to pursue a full time chef career. In his first month there he won the prestigious Grand Prize at the Rolls Royce-Krug Champagne Invitational Chef Competition. Melton opened two new restaurants while in Chicago, one of which was named as one of the top ten new restaurants in the area. He frequently did cooking demonstrations and prepared food for a variety of events, including The Chicago Jazz Festival, The American Cancer Society Ball, Mardi Gras at The Limelight Club, and many others. He also appeared on the local television program “Two on Two,” and several radio programs. The year 1990 found Melton back in North Carolina, where he still continues to spread his interpretation of the food and music he grew to love down in the bayou country. Mel is back in the spotlight, cooking on stage with his band, The Wicked Mojos, as well as off-stage. He has served as executive chef and independent restaurant consultant to many of the Triangle’s most notable restaurants and food service organizations.Twitter | Facebook
School of Rock Chapel Hill’s End of Season Showcase
Free Show / $10 Suggested Donation12:00 – Best of Shania Twain and Sheryl Crow !1:00 – Best of Creedence Clearwater Revival !2:15 – Best of Evanescence and System Of A Down !3:15 – Best of Michael Jackson and Prince !4:15 – SENIOR SENDOFF CEREMONY !4:30 – Best of Marvin Gaye and Al Green !5:30 – Best of Bruce Springsteen !6:45 – The Beatles’ “White Album” !8:15 – End of Show Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
Guy Wire
Guy Wire: Guy Wire is four guys playing homemade pop/rock nuggets. Steve Carr and Christian Fisher, Triangle area band veterans, started Guy Wire in 2019. Seasoned rhythm section players Paul Drake and Nick Vigneaux rounded out the band. Guy Wire recorded an EP (bandcamp) and has performed at a number of Triangle area venues.Bandcamp | Facebook The Petty Thieves: Founded in 2015, The Petty Thieves are a good-time band playing their favorite Tom Petty songs. They’re not impersonators, just fake Heartbreakers who play with the rock-n-roll energy of a live Petty show.Website | Instagram | Facebook Mad Crush: The members of Mud Crash all looked at the eclipse without protective glasses and emerged not blind at all, but instead with magical insights — specifically, magical insights into how to rock the house, amuse the curmudgeonly, and break otherwise intact hearts, all in one go. Members of Chapel Hill’s Mad Crush, the band acclaimed by Billboard, Robert Christgau, and WUNC’s Frank Stasio, will give their songs a licking and see what remains ticking.Bandcamp
Shamarr Allen
Shamarr Allen is the definition of New Orleans Music! Hailing from the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, Allen has influences in jazz, hip hop, rock, funk, funk blues and country. He is the lead vocalist and trumpeter of his band “Shamarr Allen and the Underdawgs” In addition to performing with his band, Allen has collaborated with many renowned artists such as Willie Nelson, Galactic, Mannie Fresh, Patti Labelle, Harry Connick Jr. and Lenny Kravitz to name a few. In addition to displaying his skills on the frontline as a lead performer, Allen is also a music composer, writer, producer and multi instrumentalist. With a scintillating and unique sound, look and exemplary talents, Allen transcends musical boundaries. He is the True Orleans Experience!Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Soundcloud
