April 2017
April 2017
MIDWEST // NYC // COLORADO // ORKNEY // MULVEY
I've been off the road for month writing songs, and tonight I'll meet Billy in Minneapolis to begin a Midwest tour. I don't want to start a panic and cripple the internet, but tickets for these Midwest shows are still available and we're playing some lovely rooms, rooms in which I myself would enjoy seeing a show, especially if I weren't in that show. There's a new album in the works, a studio booked, a rigorous calisthenics regime imposed on all band members, and this tour is your chance to hear the new songs first, before we actually know them.
MIDWEST - In the first half of April we’ll be on the road in the Midwest playing small towns in Wisconsin, with one appearance in Duluth where Billy Conway lived part of his boyhood and was apparently a speed skating prodigy. The tour starts in La Crosse at the Cavalier Theater (4/5), and proceeds to the Heyde Center for the Arts in Chippewa Falls (4/6), the Mineral Point Opera House in Mineral Point (4/7), and Thrasher Opera House in Green Lake (4/8). After a short break to make a record we’ll pick back up in Hayward, WI at the Park Theatre (4/14), and then finish back up in Minnesota at the Sacred Heart Music Center in Duluth (4/15). The leg of the tour we'll be full band with Eric Heywood on steel and electric guitar, and Jeremy Moses Curtis on bass. Our friends in the Minneapolis duo Dusty Heart open the Mineral Point, Green Lake, and Hayward shows, so we'll all have to up our sartorial game.
NYC - I just booked a one-night stand in New York City at City Vineyard at Pier 26 (4/26), part of the City Winery operation, and it is very likely to be the only solo show all year, so if you want to come hear it in the raw this is your opportunity. Secure your tickets, this is a small room and it will sell out.
COLORADO - In the first week of May we’ll start a Colorado tour at the Downtown Artery in Fort Collins (5/2), continue on through Society Hall in Alamosa (5/3), Brues Alehouse in Pueblo (5/4), Daniels Hall at Swallow Hill in Denver (5/5), The Sherbino in Ridgway (5/6), and finish up at the Sunflower Theater in Cortez (5/7). Fine Denver songwriter Megan Burtt will come along to open all shows.
ORKNEY - Last year in Denmark I walked up to a circle of men standing near the headquarters of the festival we were playing, in order to ask an innocent question about the hotel shuttle. Twenty minutes later I had been absorbed into that circle - a band as it turned out, called The Chair - and given a number of opportunities to share the bottle of whiskey that was handing around. That, friends, is how you get booked into a festival on Orkney Island.
MULVEY - My old friend Peter Mulvey, the man directly or indirectly responsible for my career, my marriage, and my intense dislike for Scrabble, has released a beautiful new record called 'Are You Listening.' For as long as I've been making records I've shared the process, from hotel room sketch to master recording, with Peter. We've spent thousands of miles together on the road arguing about it in all its particulars, and he's one of the people in this business I love and respect. You can listen to the new album here, but more importantly you can do the right thing and buy it, here.
That about covers it. This summer we'll tour the desert southwest in June, play the Bob Marshall Music Festival and Red Ants Pants Festival in Montana in July, Salmon Arm Roots and Blues Festival in British Columbia and Jam in the Trees in North Carolina (locations which though near-rhymes are actually about 2,600 miles distant) in August. In the fall we'll tour North America family-style, full band on a split-bill with Kris Delmhorst for the release of her new album THE WILD this fall.
If you know anyone in any of the towns mentioned above, please forward this email, tell them we're nice people mostly. Meanwhile, do your part to halt America's descent into what the sorely missed poet Jim Harrison described as a fascist Disneyland. Call your law-makers, harass your own blood relatives, and be unnervingly kind the whole time.