Jon Shain & FJ Ventre

Jon Shain is a veteran singer-songwriter who’s been turning heads for years with his words and his fiery acoustic guitar work, and his evolved musical style – combining improvised piedmont blues with bluegrass, swing, and ragtime. Shain had the good fortune to learn directly from a number of North Carolina’s older blues players, and became a member of Big Boy Henry’s backing band. He is the 2019 winner of the International Blues Challenge in the solo/duo category. In addition, Shain was a finalist (along with FJ Ventre) in the 2009 International Blues Challenge, he won both the 2008 and 2018 Triangle Blues Society’s Blues Challenge and was the 2006 winner of NC’s Indy award for Best Folk Act. Shain’s most recent solo disc, Gettin’ Handy with the Blues: A Tribute to the Legacy of WC Handy, was released in January, 2018. Shain’s newest album, Never Found A Way to Tame the Blues, recorded along with long-time collaborator FJ Ventre was released in July.FJ Ventre and Jon began playing music together in 1982 when they met in high school. FJ went on to University of Massachusetts-Lowell, earning a B.A. in Music Performance and Sound Recording. He remained in the Boston area, performing in the city’s vibrant music scene. Since relocating to Chapel Hill, NC in 2000, Ventre has performed with his own group The Swang Brothers, as well as most of the Triangle’s roots acts. In addition to performing as a sought-after sideman, he spends his time behind the mixing board, engineering at his own Good Luck Studio. With Jon, they have become sought-after producers in the folk/Americana genre, producing several charting Folk and Blues albums in the last few years. https://jonshain.com/jon-shain-and-fj-ventre/

Futurebirds

Rock juggernaut Futurebirds’ newest EP, Bloomin’ Too, is a benchmark that not only celebrates 13 years together, it’s also a testament to the sheer iron will of a group of musicians hungry for the fruits of its labor.“Futurebirds is the best it’s been right now, far and away,” says singer/guitarist Carter King. “We’ve been unintentionally carving out our own space since the beginning, since we never exactly fit in anywhere else musically. We were always too indie rock for the jam festival, too country for the indie scene, a little too psych-rock to feel like we were Americana. The music over the years just kind of created its own weird little ecosystem — it’s thriving and it feels great.”The Athens, Georgia-based group once again tapped storied My Morning Jacket guitarist/producer Carl Broemel in the latest chapter of this seamless, bountiful partnership that initially came to fruition with the 2021 EP, Bloomin’.“Carl is extremely perceptive and an all-around smart dude. He’s really in tune with what the band is and what it strives to be. He’s engaged and understands our vision,” King says. “He’s a longtime hero of ours, and now is a friend and collaborator. It’s wild. And it’s great to be able to defer to someone you respect so much with creative decisions in the studio — we don’t just give that trust to just anybody.”Captured this past spring at the legendary Ronnie’s Place in Nashville, Tennessee, the seven-song Bloomin’ Too is a vortex of sonic textures. The album ricochets from cosmic space, rock to rough around the edges, alt-country dreamscapes, sandy beach bum odes to kick in your step pop ballads — all signature tones and musical avenues at the core of the Birds’ wide musical palette.“This is probably the quickest turnaround we’ve ever had for a record — we felt confident right when we got into the studio and just cranked it out,” says singer/guitarist Daniel Womack. “All of our frequencies are aligned as a band, where we’ve got this free-flow of ideas happening. We’re all on the same page right now and we have a lot of momentum going.”For Broemel, he finds a sincere kinship and solidarity with Futurebirds. Witnessing first-hand the band’s blue-collar work ethic in the studio, Broemel was impressed and inspired by the ‘Birds’ democratic ways and means in how music is created and cultivated in the studio.“Futurebirds have this unique vibe with three singer-songwriters in the band, where everyone is constantly shifting their function depending on the song,” Broemel says. “Everyone just kind of falls into place and finds something to contribute. Someone will lead the charge on one song, then fall back and let another take charge on the next — it’s something rare to see and behold in rock music, where normally there’s just one songwriter and one leader.”That camaraderie between founding members King, Womack, singer/guitarist Thomas Johnson and bassist Brannen Miles began when they were college students at the University of Georgia. In recent years, the quartet has added pedal steel player Kiffy Myers, keyboardist Spencer Thomas and drummer Tom Myers.Website | Instagram | Facebook

Nina Garbus, Tiger Beach

Nina Garbus: Website | Bandcamp | InstagramTiger Beach: Bandcamp | Instagram

Maddie Wiener

This is a seated show.At 23 years old, Maddie Wiener has opened for Dave Attell, Nikki Glaser, Rich Vos, Tim Dillon, Robert Kelly, Joe List, Drew Michael, Jared Freid, Andrew Santino, and others. She was selected as a New Face at the 2021 Just for Laughs Festival, and recently taped a stand up set for Comedy Central. She has also appeared on You Up w/ Nikki Glaser on Comedy Central’s Sirius XM channel, and PAUSE with Sam Jay on HBO. She is a regular at The Stand in New York City, Goodnights Comedy Club in her home state of North Carolina, and some weird bars in between.Website

Duster

Gather your loved ones, Together is here. Duster’s fourth album is a 13-song exploration of comfortable, interplanetary goth. A sonic vaseline of submerged guitars, solder-burned synths, and over-driven rhythm tracks. “I know people say, ‘Oh Duster music so sad, we’ve even said it ourselves before,” Clay Parton said. “But it’s a lot more like absurdism than nihilism.”Website | Instagram | Twitter

Joywave

The Mountain Goats

Maybe you are just like John Darnielle: In the depths of the pandemic winter at the end of 2020, the Mountain Goats frontman passed the time trapped at home in North Carolina watching pulpy action movies, finding comfort in familiar tropes and sofabound escapism. But you are not really like John Darnielle, unless the action movies you found comfort in included French thrillers like 2008’s Mesrine, vintage Italian poliziotteschi, or the 1974 Donald Pleasence mad-scientist vehicle The Freakmaker. Or unless watching them brought you back to your formative days as an artist, when watching films fueled and soundtracked your songwriting jags and bare-bones home recordings and in turn inspired your 20th album to be a song cycle about the allure—and futility—of vengeance. But there’s no shame in not being like John Darnielle; few people are.“On earlier tapes you’ll find these sound samples,” Darnielle says. “‘Oh, where’s this sample from?’ It’s from whatever movie I was watching while I was sitting around on the couch with a guitar. I watch a movie, somebody’d say something that I like the sound of and I’ll write that phrase down. And then I would pause the VHS, write the song, record the song on a boombox, and go back to watching my movie. I got into doing that again; I just kept watching action movies and taking notes on what they’re about and on what the governing plots and tropes and styles are. It was very much like an immersion method acting technique.”The resulting performance is Bleed Out, a cinematic experience unto itself. One song about preparing to exact bloody revenge begat another song about the act of exacting bloody revenge and then more songs about and the causes and the aftermath of being driven to exact bloody revenge, each delivered with the urgency and desperation deserving of their narrators and circumstances.Just as Getting Into Knives and Dark in Here—recorded in Memphis and Muscle Shoals, respectively, in the first two weeks of March 2020, just before such a thing would become impossible—were heavily informed and influenced by their historic settings, Bleed Out is all pent-up energy and explosion, executed by a bunch of friends who were mainly happy to be in a room together making loud noises. In January 2021, just weeks after Darnielle had started writing, his bandmates Peter Hughes, Matt Douglas, and Jon Wurster joined him at a studio in the woods near his home in Chapel Hill. Everything was finished inside a week.“We often make a record and then bring in some guests who flesh out the textures,” Darnielle says. “And for this one, it was very much like a pack mentality. That sort of seemed to proceed from the songs.” One new face was that of Bully’s Alicia Bognanno, recommended to Darnielle by his manager as a producer who could help nurture the rougher-edged sound these songs requested. “We met up and hit it off. She’s a great guitarist. It was kind of just a lark, to see what would happen, and it was totally great.”That abandon is on full display from the opening track, “Training Montage,” which lovingly documents the getting-ready-for-battle scene in any action movie regardless of provenance and loudly declares its intentions: “I’m doing this for revenge.” This and the next song, “Mark on You,” were the first two Darnielle wrote, and they set the tone for everything that follows on Bleed Out.Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube

Emily Scott Robinson + Alisa Amador + Violet Bell

This is a seated show.An evening of special performances from Emily Scott Robinson, Alisa Amador, and Violet Bell. Fans will hear music from each artist individually and the trio will come together to perform songs from Robinson’s latest release with Oh Boy Records, “Built on Bones.”“Built on Bones” is a collection of six original songs for the Witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The recordings feature Emily Scott Robinson (writer/composer), Alisa Amador (NPR Tiny Desk Contest Winner 2022) and Lizzy Ross (of duo Violet Bell) as the three witches singing through the tragedy of Macbeth in three-part harmony. Emily Scott Robinson Website | Instagram | YouTube | Facebook | Twitter | Latest Video: “Double Double”Alisa Amador Website | Instagram | YouTube | Facebook | Twitter | Latest Video: “High and Dry” (Radiohead)Violet Bell Website | Instagram | YouTube | Facebook | Twitter | Latest Video: “All the Stars” (Live)

Hammered Hulls

Hammered Hulls’ debut LP ‘Careening’ may very well be the last record to be recorded and mixed at famed Washington, DC area recording studio Inner Ear. Engineered by studio owner Don Zientara and produced by Ian MacKaye, ‘Careening’ was started right before the pandemic lockdown and completed in summer/fall of 2021. A new band of long-time players, Hammered Hulls’ music hews close to some of their early influences. Alec MacKaye is the voice, Mark Cisneros is the guitarist, Mary Timony takes a nimble and rarely-heard turn as bassist, and Chris Wilson commands the drums. Each of them brings their individual imprint to the total sound. This concussion of strength upon strength, unified by vulnerable songs, only barely contained, is the signature sound of Hammered Hulls.Bandcamp | Instagram | Dischord

David Cross

This show is Ages 18+ only.Partially seated – first come first served general admission seating available.Charity Fee: $2 from every ticket will go to support The Innocence Project which works to free the innocent, prevent wrongful convictions, and create fair, compassionate, and equitable systems of justice for everyone. Founded in 1992 by Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, the organization is now an independent nonprofit. Our work is guided by science and grounded in antiracism.https://innocenceproject.org/Phone-Free Event: This event will be a phone-free experience. Use of cellphones, smart watches, smart accessories, cameras or recording devices will not be permitted in the performance space. Anyone seen using a cellphone or recording device during the performance will be immediately escorted out of the venue. We appreciate your cooperation in creating a phone-free viewing experience. Please note: this is NOT a Yondr event.Copyright Notice: David Cross owns all rights in the content and materials, including any jokes and sketches (the “Materials”), delivered during his performance. The Materials may not be copied, translated, transmitted, displayed, distributed, or reproduced verbatim (the “Use”), in whole or in part, in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, without the express prior written consent of David Cross. Any Use of the Materials without the express prior written consent of David Cross is strictly prohibited and shall be subject to all available legal remedies, whether in equity or at law at the cost of anyone who violates this prohibition.Emmy Award winner and two-time Grammy Award nominee David Cross is an inventive performer, writer, and producer on stage and screen.In November, Cross taped a comedy special to be released in 2022. He makes guest appearances in the new, critically-acclaimed HBO Max miniseries, Station Eleven, which premiered on December 16, and in the HBO Max film, 8-Bit Christmas, which premiered in November. In March, Cross starred in the National Geographic series, Genius: Aretha, portraying famed music producer, Jerry Wexler opposite Cynthia Erivo as Aretha Franklin.Cross received rave reviews for his starring role in the dramatic film, The Dark Divide. Based on the beloved book, “Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide,” by Robert Pyle, one of America’s premiere nature writers, the film recreates Pyle’s perilous 1995 journey across one of America’s largest undeveloped wildlands.Cross’ last special, Oh Come On, is now available on Amazon Prime and Peacock. The special was originally released on May 10, 2019, simultaneously in a 10-city theatrical run. The Oh, Come On special was filmed in August 2018 at The Orange Peel in Asheville, NC. The album version of Oh, Come On was recorded in November 2018 in Birmingham, AL and is available on iTunes, Spotify, Sirius XM, Google Play and at physical retailers.Cross’ Oh Come On international tour visited theatres in more than 70 cities including London, Manchester, Glasgow, Dublin, Amsterdam and cities across North America.Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube

Genre: Miscellaneous