James McMurtry
A Lone Star sheriff hunts quail on horseback and keeps a secret second family. A mechanic lies among the spare parts on the floor of his garage and wonders if he canafford to keep his girlfriend. A troubled man sees hallucinations of a black dog and a wandering boy and hums “Weird Al” songs in his head. These are some of the strangeand richly drawn characters who inhabit James McMurtry’s eleventh album, The Black Dog & the Wandering Boy. A supremely insightful and inventive storyteller, he teasesvivid worlds out of small details, setting them to arrangements that have the elements of Americana—rolling guitars, barroom harmonies, traces of banjo and harmonica—butsound too sly and smart for such a general category. Funny and sad often in the same breath, the album adds a new chapter to a long career that has enjoyed a resurgence as young songwriters like Sarah Jarosz and Jason Isbell cite him as a formative influence. As varied as they are, these new story-songs find inspiration in scraps from his family’s past: a stray sketch, an old poem by a family friend, the hallucinations experienced by his father, the writer Larry McMurtry. “It’s something I do all the time,” he says, “but usually I draw from my own scraps.” As any good writer will do, McMurtry collects littleideas and hangs on to them for years, sometimes even decades. “South Texas Lawman” grew out of a line from a poem by a friend of the McMurtry clan, T.D. Hobart. Driven by gravelly guitars and a loose rhythm section, it’s a careful study of a man whose feelings of obsolescence motivate him to take drastic action in the final verse. “Dwight’d stay at our house way back in the ‘70s, when we lived in Virginia. During one visit he wrote this poem about his father’s attitude toward South Texas. He wrote it down on cardboard, and I came across it recently. There was a line about hunting quail on horseback, and that was the seed of the song. I’ve lost the poem since then.” The rumbling title track, a kind of squirrelly blues, features two mysterious figures who appear only to those slipping from reality, yet it’s never grim nor especially despairing.Instead, McMurtry namechecks a “Weird Al” deep cut and depicts a tortured soul who doesn’t have to work a nine-to-five. He finds a defiant humor in the situation at odds with the gravity of the source material. “The title of the album and that song comes from my stepmother, Faye. After my dad passed, she asked me if he ever talked to me about his hallucinations. He’d gone into dementia for a while before he died, but hadn’t mentioned to me anything about seeing things. She told me his favorite hallucinations were the black dog and the wandering boy. I took them and applied them to a fictional character.” Soon McMurtry had enough of these songs for a new record. “It happened like all my records happened. It’d been too long since I’d had a record that the press could writeabout and get people to come out to my shows. It was time.” What was different this time was the presence of his old friend Don Dixon, who produced McMurtry’s thirdalbum, Where You’d Hide the Body?, back in 1995. “A couple of years ago I quit producing myself. I felt like I was repeating myself methodologically and stylistically. Ineeded to go back to producer school, so I brought in CC Adcock for Complicated Game, and then Ross Hogarth did The Horses & the Hounds. Website | Facebook
Honey Magpie
Chapel Hill, NC – On June 27, Chapel Hill-based folk pop band Honey Magpie will celebrate ten years at the Cat’s Cradle Back Room in Carrboro, NC. The show will trace the band’s work from the very first song they played together to their newest, unreleased pieces. And bring your mermaid tail, because they’re also celebrating the mythical tales that have shaped their writing and inspired their sound. Few local bands can claim a ten-year lifespan, but Honey Magpie has made it to this milestone anniversary, and they’re still going strong. Since their 2015 debut at Fitzgerald’s in Chapel Hill, Honey Magpie has released two albums, Honey Magpie (2017), which centered on sweet, feel-good folk, and Midnight Morning (2020), which explored nostalgia, disillusionment, and straight-up silliness. Though their sound and lineup have evolved over the years – from a 5-piece band to a strings-and-vocals trio to a duo – singer-songwriters Rachael Hurwitz (vocals, guitar, keys) and Pippa Hoover (vocals, cello) have been the steady heart of the band. On the surface a somewhat unlikely duo – Rachael brings most of the “Honey,” while Pippa is more of a “Magpie” – their collaboration has created a body of work full of delicious contrast. Their songs are bittersweet, bitingly comedic, fantastical, yet emotionally real. And the two singer-songwriters are well-matched where it counts. Both love vocal harmonies, nature imagery, and referencing classic fairy tales, often subversively. Their song “Lost in the Woods” depicts a more savvy, self-possessed Little Red Riding Hood, while “Ugly Duckling” tells a story better aligned with the true, antagonistic nature of swans. But the fairy tale tune that best encapsulates Honey Magpie’s ten-year journey might be “Mermaid (Crest of a Wave),” which reimagines Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid from the perspective of the protagonist’s sisters. Although released on Honey Magpie’s second album, the song originated as a chord progression the band began tinkering with in their first year together. It’s a song that developed as Honey Magpie matured, and the central figure of the mermaid – half fish, half human – is the perfect symbol for the contrast found throughout Honey Magpie’s work. Opening the night is Nashville-based singer-songwriter and cellist Sarah Clanton, who, in a fitting twist, is also a professional mermaid. Sarah’s cello-infused indie folk pairs seamlessly with Honey Magpie’s equally cello-rich sound, and guests just might get to see her tail! Guest musicians Brenden Macie (banjo, bass) and others to be announced will join Rachael and Pippa, providing full-band instrumentation. Doors open at 6:00 pm and the show starts at 7:00 pm. Tickets are available for $12 in advance through the Cat’s Cradle website or for $15 at the door. The Cat’s Cradle Backroom is located at 300 E Main St., Carrboro, NC 27510. Website | Facebook | Instagram | SoundCloud | YouTube
Cosmic Jerryfest Night 1
Cosmic Jerryfest – 2 Night Ticket for Friday 5/30 and Saturday 5/31 available here! Cosmic Jerryfest – Night #1Fri May 30 @ Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro NC——————————- Get your summer off to a groovy start, with COSMIC JERRYFEST!Featuring 2 nights of Cosmic Charlie performing ALL Jerry Garcia songs! Night #1 – May 30 will feature a special “Jerry-oke” opening set where select fans will get a chance to sing a song w/ Cosmic Charlie! Come browse dye merch & groovy stuff! **Special discounted 2-night tickets available – just $35 gets you in BOTH nights! ————————-COSMIC CHARLIE “Cosmic Charlie really is a great band – these guys do this music the way it should be done: having the conversation in their own voices.” -David Gans, Grateful Dead Hour Cosmic Charlie was born in the musical Mecca of Athens, Georgia. From its summer 1999 inception, the band swiftly cemented its reputation as a band that puts a unique and personal twist on the Grateful Dead catalogue. Cosmic Charlie is a Dead cover band for folks that are ambivalent about Dead cover bands. Rather than mimicking the Dead exactly, Cosmic Charlie chooses to tap into the Dead’s energy and style as a foundation on which to build. The result is healthy balance of creativity and tradition, where both the band and its audience are taken to that familiar edge with the sense that, music is actually being MADE here tonight. Moving and shaking even the most skeptical of Deadheads, Cosmic Charlie storms into a town and plays with an energy that eludes other bands, an energy that sometimes eluded the Dead themselves. Those precious moments during Dead jams when the synchronicity is there and all is right with the world – these are the moments that Cosmic Charlie relishes and feverishly welcomes with open arms. Clearly, Cosmic Charlie’s audiences are also eager to partake in these moments, and together with the band, they have indulged in many memorable evenings. Most nights, Cosmic Charlie walks onstage without a setlist, not even knowing what the first song will be. Any Dead tune can rear its head at any moment, and fan requests are always welcome. “INSPIRATION, MOVE ME BRIGHTLY” is Cosmic Charlie’s mantra, allowing the music to truly play the band. Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube —————– JERRY-OKE On Fri May 30 Cosmic Charlie will start the show with a “Jerry-oke” set, where a few select audience members will get to sing a song with Cosmic Charlie! If interested in singing, please send a message to Cosmic Charlie and we will reply with more info.
Cosmic Jerryfest Night 2
Cosmic Jerryfest – 2 Night Ticket for Friday 5/30 and Saturday 5/31 available here! Cosmic Jerryfest – Night #2Sat May 31 @ Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro NC——————————- Get your summer off to a groovy start, with COSMIC JERRYFEST! Featuring 2 nights of Cosmic Charlie performing ALL Jerry Garcia songs! Night #2 – May 31 – Come early for a special opening set from Liquid Garcia Tie dye merch & groovy stuff! **Special discounted 2-night tickets available – just $35 gets you in BOTH nights! ————————-COSMIC CHARLIE “Cosmic Charlie really is a great band – these guys do this music the way it should be done: having the conversation in their own voices.” -David Gans, Grateful Dead Hour Cosmic Charlie was born in the musical Mecca of Athens, Georgia. From its summer 1999 inception, the band swiftly cemented its reputation as a band that puts a unique and personal twist on the Grateful Dead catalogue. Cosmic Charlie is a Dead cover band for folks that are ambivalent about Dead cover bands. Rather than mimicking the Dead exactly, Cosmic Charlie chooses to tap into the Dead’s energy and style as a foundation on which to build. The result is healthy balance of creativity and tradition, where both the band and its audience are taken to that familiar edge with the sense that, music is actually being MADE here tonight. Moving and shaking even the most skeptical of Deadheads, Cosmic Charlie storms into a town and plays with an energy that eludes other bands, an energy that sometimes eluded the Dead themselves. Those precious moments during Dead jams when the synchronicity is there and all is right with the world – these are the moments that Cosmic Charlie relishes and feverishly welcomes with open arms. Clearly, Cosmic Charlie’s audiences are also eager to partake in these moments, and together with the band, they have indulged in many memorable evenings. Most nights, Cosmic Charlie walks onstage without a setlist, not even knowing what the first song will be. Any Dead tune can rear its head at any moment, and fan requests are always welcome. “INSPIRATION, MOVE ME BRIGHTLY” is Cosmic Charlie’s mantra, allowing the music to truly play the band. Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube —————– LIQUID GARCIA Liquid Garcia features all-stars of the Raleigh music scene playing kick-ass versions of Jerry Garcia’s music. 1980’s energy with a 70’s vibe! All stars of the Raleigh music scene playing kick-ass versions of Jerry Garcia’s music. 1980’s energy with a 70’s vibe!
Emerson Bruno and the Undercurrents, Satellite Dog
Last Date Last Date is an alternative and pop-rock band based in Chapel Hill, NC, formed in November of 2023. Their punchy sound is created by lead singer Sarah Brooks, lead guitarist Nate Hicks, bassist Joy Frost, rhythm guitarist Thomas Ferguson, and drummer Kevin Pacas. Emerson Bruno and the Undercurrents Emerson Bruno and the UndercurrentsAs a lyricist and melodic writer, Emerson Bruno evokes a sentimental and familiar quality that captivates listeners. Drawing inspiration from the music of the 60s, many elements of the Laurel Canyon recipe are captured and presented with a modern twist. Compelling lyrics of the universal human condition create a sense of understanding that is packed into unique arrangements. Accompanied by a cast of gifted musicians, the music of Emerson Bruno has reached a full form and is equipped to bring the muscle to the stage. Satellite Dog Satellite Dog is a Psych-Groove band from North Carolina. Taking sonic inspiration from the psychedelic rock n’ roll whirlwind of the 1960’s and 1970’s, they combine musical ideas from a plethora of inspirations to form a uniquely retro-modern psych-groove soundscape. Relying heavily on improvisation during live shows, they twist and turn in and out of original tunes as well as originally-spun covers by bands such as the Grateful Dead and Phish.
Sally Anne Morgan (full band)
Worried Songs Presents: Sally Anne Morgan (full band) Josh Kimbrough Cameron Knowler Adeline Hotel Worried Songs is a record label based in New Brighton, UK focusing on the American underground. Their catalog includes releases from: Edsel Axle, Ralph White, Josh Kimbrough, Cameron Knowler, and Joseph Allred. On the occasion of Cameron Knowler’s ‘CMK’ release, Worried Songs has hopped the pond and jumped in the car with Cameron to tour the east coast. Carrboro, North Carolina is their final celebratory stop. Sally Anne Morgan plays haunting psychedelic Appalachian folk drone that invokes the rhododendron thickets, creeks and mountains of her local landscape in Western North Carolina. Sally plays with the Black Twig Pickers and House and Land, dedicated practitioners of traditional music re-cast by appreciation of modern improvisation, minimalism, microtonality and drone from across the globe. Her latest ‘Second Circle the Horizon’ is set to be released June 20th on Thrill Jockey. Josh Kimbrough is a fingerstyle guitarist from Chapel Hill. Patient melodic phrasing and precise-but-pliable grooves are trademarks of Kimbrough’s compositions. His debut album ‘Slither, Soar & Disappear’ brings to mind a host of artists from Jansch, Drake, and Fahey, to the Penguin Café Orchestra and Mike Hurley. Cameron Knowler brandishes a post-modern perspective on American traditional music. Folk Radio UK describes his compositions as “Western sound-painting.” His new instrumental album ‘CMK’ (with guests: Dylan Day, Jordan Tice, and Rayna Gellert) features delightful and adventurous flat picking forays as well as tranquil and introspective fingerstyle moments. Adeline Hotel is the musical outlet of multi-instrumentalist Dan Knishkowy, the co-founder of Ruination Records. Knishkowy’s story-rich songs, serene fingerpicking, and hushed vocals all beckon you to lean in for a closer listen. And when you do, you enter into a gripping and gorgeous sonic universe. Pitchfork’s Sam Sodomsky describes Knishkowy’s music as “the aural equivalent of tracing your fingers through cool sand at sunrise”.
The Mayflies USA Album Release Show
The Mayflies USA arrived on the post-indie-boom mid-90’s Chapel Hill scene as an anomaly, playing tuneful, ragged rock once memorably described in Spin Magazine as “r-o-c-k like they don’t make anymore… dreaming of the Replacements and Pure Prairie League and proud of it.” Their debut album “Summertown” was released in 1999 to widespread acclaim as an instant modern power-pop classic, and they released two other well-regarded albums: 2000’s The Pity List and 2002’s Walking in a Straight Line. Bandcamp | Facebook | Spotify
Soda Water Sea
Soda Water Sea is a musical collective from Durham, NC. A rock band, a chorus, a mini-orchestra, 20ish people of all ages making beautiful music together. Bandcamp
Pearl
Pearl, originally from a small town in Michigan known as, Grass Lake, started writing songs when she was six-years-old. Over the years, Pearl has spent many days busking on sidewalks and piers, playing in bars, performing at festivals and doing shows of her own. She has lived all over the USA, moving from west coast to east coast, and her music uniquely reflects her experiences. We are often reminded of the rock classics when she performs, with her raspy voice and magnetic presence. Known as @unaestheticsurferpearlz on TikTok, her music has recently started receiving viral attention, gaining organic popularity on social media platforms. Website | Instagram | TikTok | Spotify
Hotline TNT – Path of Totality 2025
Will Anderson needed to call a timeout. It was October 2024, in the studio of modern D.I.Y. hero Amos Pitsch, clear across Wisconsin from the small town where Anderson was raised. As he has done for every increasingly absorbing Hotline TNT album, Anderson arrived at the studio with eight, maybe nine demos he liked, leaving himself room not only to expand their sound but to write a few tracks in the room, too. But this time, and for the first time, the quartet that had toured for the last 10 months as Hotline TNT had come with Anderson, somewhat unexpectedly. He had intended to make one more album his way—holing up with a producer and building songs piece by piece, as he’d done for the 2023 breakthrough Cartwheel—before making Hotline TNT a full-band affair in the future. But guitarist Lucky Hunter, bassist Haylen Trammel, and drummer Mike Ralston wanted in. Anderson relented. As they cycled repeatedly through one of Anderson’s demos, they couldn’t unlock the way to play it, the power and pattern that Hunter’s and Anderson’s guitars needed to share. When Hunter began playing a part that had nothing to do with that song, Anderson dipped, heading upstairs with his guitar in a spell of mild pique and fatigue. When he emerged a few hours later, he’d written “The Scene,” a spiraling-and-stomping new song about wanting someone to throw a tantrum on your behalf. The rest of Hotline TNT, meanwhile, had written a lunging and moody instrumental, guitars pulled as tightly as razor wire against Motorik drums. Anderson resisted at first but then helped finish “Break Right.” Both songs are now tentpoles of Raspberry Moon, the most sweeping and compelling Hotline TNT album to date and, crucially, the first built by a full band. Oh, the other song they couldn’t get right? No one remembers its name. That moment is but one element of the vulnerability and romance that funneled into Raspberry Moon, a generationally great statement of youthful wistfulness and very adult growth that also happens to be very charming and sometimes funny. Not only did Anderson cement his touring band in the studio, but he also wrote the most direct love songs of his life, winning testaments to a relationship that has seemed to change his perspective on sweetness, sincerity, life itself. And when the quartet finished tracking with Pitsch, Anderson essentially handed him the tracks and asked him to play along, adding harmonies, keyboards, and percussion wherever he felt it worked. (Pitsch is credited as the fifth member here—so much for a solo project, huh?) Some of these 11 songs still deal with the sting of regret, of being left or leaving, as Hotline TNT always has. But this is a record animated by a sense of newness and possibility, of pushing back against the global sense that curtains are closing to make room in your own life for new friends. It is perfect music for looking forward, no matter how fucked the past may feel. Two months before Hotline TNT stopped at Pitsch’s Crutch of Memory between tour dates, Anderson thought another version of his touring band had reached its ignominious end. They were three songs into a set at Poland’s Off Festival when, in front of a few thousand people, Hunter’s knee rotated 180 degrees, fracturing his kneecap and ripping the sinew. Paramedics cleared the room and carted him to a hospital. The band assumed it was just another unlucky break, like the meningitis that forced Anderson to lay in a cot in the back of a van during an early Cartwheel tour or the litany of lineup squabbles and fractures during the band’s first seven years. Website | Bandcamp | Instagram
