Join us for a rare double bill with Patty Griffin and Rickie Lee Jones, two of America’s most distinctive and celebrated singer-songwriters.

Patty Griffin is among the most consequential singer-songwriters of her generation, a quintessentially American artist whose wide-ranging canon incisively explores the intimate moments and universal emotions that bind us together.

Over two decades, the 2x GRAMMY® Award winner – and 7x nominee – and Americana Music Association Lifetime Achievement award winner, has crafted a remarkable body of work in progress that prompted the New York Times to hail her for “[writing] cameo-carved
songs that create complete emotional portraits of specific people…[her] songs have independent lives that continue in your head when the music ends.”

2019 saw the acclaimed release of the renowned artist’s GRAMMY® Award-winning 10th studio recording, PATTY GRIFFIN. One of the most deeply personal recordings of Griffin’s remarkable two-decade career and first-ever eponymous LP, PATTY GRIFFIN made a top 5 debut on Billboard’s “Independent Albums” chart amidst unprecedented worldwide acclaim, and later, a prestigious GRAMMY® Award for “Best Folk Album.”

Griffin’s new album, CROWN OF ROSES, is a deeply personal and introspective work that explores themes of identity, nature, family, and womanhood. Emerging from a creative drought during the pandemic, Griffin found herself re-evaluating the stories she’d long told herself. The result is an eight-track collection that is both sparse and emotionally rich, blending folk, Americana, and blues. With CROWN OF ROSES, Griffin offers a record that’s both grounded and transcendent — one that invites listeners to release old narratives, embrace new truths, and stay truly alive while they’re here. Having crafted a rich catalog that chronicles love and death, heartache and joy, connection and detachment, Patty Griffin continues to push her art forward, as always imbuing every effort with compassion and craft, uncanny perception, and ever-increasing ingenuity.

Rickie Lee Jones is an American musician and storyteller who has been inspiring pop culture for decades, beginning with her first two seminal albums, Rickie Lee Jones and Pirates. Named the “premiere song-stylist and songwriter of her generation” (New Yorker), the two-time Grammy winner will release her first all jazz album in April 2023, produced by Russ Titelman. In 2021, Jones released her celebrated memoir Last Chance Texaco, named Book of the Year by MOJO and a Best Book of the Year at Pitchfork and NPR. The Independent writes, “There has always been something defiant about Rickie Lee Jones . . . a voice from a dream, elusive yet familiar, transcendent, a messenger from another place.”

On the heels of two Grammy-winning albums in succession, with her band Golden Highway—2022’s Crooked Tree and 2023’s City of Gold—plus a nomination for Best New Artist, Molly Tuttle returns with a solo album that’s her most dazzling to date: So Long Little Miss Sunshine.

Recorded in Nashville with producer Jay Joyce (Orville Peck, Miranda Lambert, Lainey Wilson, Eric Church, Cage the Elephant), the fifth full album from the California-born, Nashville-based singer, songwriter, and virtuoso guitarist features twelve new songs—eleven originals and one highly unexpected cover of Icona Pop and Charli xcx’s “I Love It.”

Tuttle’s career, which began at age fifteen, has charted a course between honoring bluegrass and stretching its boundaries. On this album—a hybrid of pop, country, rock, and flat-picking, plus one murder ballad—she goes to a whole new place. Her stunning guitar work is more up-front on this album than ever before. (One of the most decorated female guitarist alive, Tuttle was the first woman to win the prestigious International Bluegrass Music Award’s Guitar Player of the Year in 2017, at age twenty-four, and won again the following year, with nominations nearly every year since; she has also won Americana Music Association’s Instrumentalist of the Year award.) So Long Little Miss Sunshine also features Tuttle playing banjo, something she’s never done on one of her albums before.

“I like to be a bit of a chameleon with my music,” she says. “Keep people guessing and keep it full of surprises.”

Tuttle has been slowly building this collection of songs over the last five years, while also writing and releasing two hugely successful albums and a six-song EP (last year’s Into the Wild) and playing more than 100 shows each year with Golden Highway. Along the way she’d send songs to Joyce, who she first started talking to about collaborating on the album a few years ago.

“I’ve been wanting to make this record for such a long time. Part of me was scared to do such a big departure, and that went into the album title So Long Little Miss Sunshine. It’s like, ‘You know what? I’m just not going to care what people think. I’m going to do what I want.’”

The album was recorded with a group of musicians that includes drummer/percussionists Jay Bellerose and Fred Eltringham, bassist Byron House, and Joyce on multiple instruments. Ketch Secor (Old Crow Medicine Show) also plays banjo, fiddle, and harmonica, as well as singing harmony.

Tuttle also conceived the artwork for So Long Little Miss Sunshine, which features multiple Mollys, each wearing a different wig except for one with nothing on her head at all. (“I probably own as many wigs as I own guitars,” she says.) Tuttle has been bald since she was three years old due to the autoimmune condition alopecia areata; she acts as a spokesperson for the National Alopecia Areata Foundation.

“I love raising awareness,” she says. “I talk about it onstage a lot and broaden it to include anyone who’s ever had something that makes them stick out and look or feel different from others. Playing my song ‘Crooked Tree’ live is very meaningful to me, because it’s a moment where sometimes I’ll take off my wig and talk about my struggles with self-acceptance.”

One album track, “Old Me (New Wig),” is “about leaving all these things behind that don’t serve you anymore,” she says. “Parts of yourself that really aren’t in your best interest, like low self-esteem, anxieties, and not feeling confident. Learning to own these different aspects of my personality but not letting them control me is another theme of the record that inspired the album title and the cover art. Those are all things I’ve struggled with through the years—just feeling like an impostor, like I wasn’t good enough. I like singing this song because there are days when I still have to tell myself to leave that stuff behind.’”

Most of the So Long Little Miss Sunshine songs were co-written with Secor, who is also Tuttle’s partner. “We spend so much time together, we live together, and anytime I have a song idea, or he has one, it’s just so easy to transition from whatever we’re doing into writing a song.”

Although they were written in different times and circumstances, Tuttle found to her surprise that the songs were all tied together by interwoven themes. The opening track, “Everything Burns”—a dark, intense, big-guitar song—was written in 2020, during the chaos and division of the start of the Covid pandemic. It might as easily refer to the current chaos and division in America since Election Day 2024, though. In fact, they recorded it the day after the election.

There are several songs about traveling—sometimes down the open road, like “Highway Knows” and “Oasis”—but also back in time, as on “Easy” and “Golden State of Mind.”

The record also tells “a kind of coming-of-age story,” Tuttle says. “‘Golden State of Mind’ is one of the songs I feel is a through-line to that. It makes me think about people I’ve been close to in the past that I’ve drifted away from, and about growing up and figuring out who you are.”

That theme is in turn picked up in the beautiful ballad “No Regrets,” one of the last songs Tuttle wrote for the album. “It’s about looking back on your life and thinking, ‘Well, maybe I could have done things differently, but if I hadn’t made certain mistakes or gone down certain roads, then I wouldn’t be here.’ And I really like where I am now!”

So Long Little Miss Sunshine closes, as her last two albums did, with an autobiographical song, “Story of My So-Called Life.” “This is me looking back on my life, from growing up to going to school in Boston to moving to Nashville to where I am now—taking stock of all these pivotal moments throughout my life that made me who I am. I feel like after I’ve said so much in all the other songs, it’s just kind of nice to end it on a note of, ‘Here’s how this all came to be,’” she says.

Earlier this year, Tuttle played guitar and sang on Ringo Starr’s new country album, Look Up. She also played with him and a host of other stellar musical guests at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium and Grand Ole Opry as part of his televised Ringo & Friends shows. She was inspired by his fearlessness in following his passion for country music. “It is cool to see someone like that who has done everything you could imagine doing in a music career and he’s still just so psyched and still has a list of things that he wants to accomplish,” Tuttle says.

Looking back on her own career, Tuttle admits that she also has pursued what interests her: “It has never been a cookie-cutter thing where I’m just going down a straight road. I always had this crooked path.”

When he calls, Bob Mould is finishing work on his 15^th solo album, Here We Go Crazy. A distillation of the unfailing melodic skill, the emotional lucidity and dynamic fluency he’s developed over more than four decades, it’s also a typically bold realignment of his sonic paradigm. Its turbulent vignettes are scored by Mould’s familiar bruised tunefulness, but the sound is pared back to its fundaments, 11 songs blistering past in just over 30 minutes. “I’ve stripped things back to what excited me as a young guitarist,” he explains. “The energy, the electricity.”

Part of the inspiration for this more primal aesthetic is the heavy itinerary of touring he’s lately undertaken, several years spent circling the globe, either in the company of bandmates Jon Wurster (drums) and Jason Narducy (bass) or just by himself. “I was really throwing myself in the songbook and feeling where the audience is at,” he says. “And they were really responding to this very simple, just-me-and-a-guitar setup. And I thought, maybe I shouldn’t be overcomplicating things, ‘word’-ing or ‘craft’-ing it up. Just grab for the simple bits of life we still have control over: our emotions, our relationships.”

After shows, Mould would hang out signing merch and talking to fans. “Sometimes people bring a lot of their lifetime emotional content to me,” he says, “like they’ve compressed all this coal into a tiny little diamond. Sometimes I’m surprised at the weight of it, the heaviness. I’m like, ‘I’m here for you. I’m listening.’ I’m shocked and grateful they share so readily with me. I don’t know what I did to earn that trust.”

Mould has earned that trust with every record he’s made, channelling his own “lifetime emotional content” for songs of wisdom, honesty and volcanic intensity. His first band, Hüsker Dü, bared his angst over furious noise and turbulent melody, an indelible influence on generations that followed. But by the time Nirvana infiltrated the mainstream, Bob Mould had already moved on, having sequestered himself in a farmhouse to lick his wounds and learn new ways to sing his songs. His solo debut, 1989’s folk-rock masterpiece Workbook, was a record of depth and sophistication. Then he pulled another sharp turn, his power-trio Sugar alloying his most melodic songs with his fiercest noise, yielding his most commercially successful work yet.

Over the solo career that followed Sugar’s own mid-90s flameout, he’s displayed a maturing gift for songwriting, transcending the ‘alternative’ tag and recognised alongside key influences like Pete Townshend and Pete Shelley. He’s adrenalized classic forms, alchemised angst into something addictive and powerful. “I’m just trying to figure myself out,” he says. “After 64 years of life – 55 spent writing songs – it’s what I do.” The concepts that shaped the songs of subsequent albums reflect those years. The ruminative Beauty & Ruin (2014) and Patch The Sky (2016) were written in the wake of losing his parents and other loved ones. 2019’s Sunshine Rock was a homage to the early Capitol singles of the Beatles and the Beach Boys, constant companions through his turbulent childhood. The terse, political Blue Hearts (2020) was written and recorded amid the dying days of the first Trump administration.

Here We Go Crazy, meanwhile, arrives at another moment of uncertainty, a time of disruption and fear. Mould sees the songs unfolding like the three acts of a play, each act exploring distinct but related themes. The first handful of songs concern “control versus chaos”, Mould explains. The opening title track contrasts images of nature – deserts, mountains, fault-lines – with the tumult of human life. Inspired by a riff that Mould says “sounded like a fistfight”, ‘Neanderthal’ is “a snapshot from inside my head as a young kid: growing up in a violent household, everything being unsettled, feeling that fight-or-flight response at all times,” while ‘Breathing Room’ is “about feeling isolated, cramped-up, and literally needing that breathing space”.

The furious, dynamic ‘Fur Mink Augurs’ signals the second act, where the darkness descends. The song channels claustrophobia, and “the cold, crazy, late-winter feeling I grew up with in the Adirondacks and in Minnesota. When the cabin fever really sets in deep – when the permafrost is set and it never gets warm – you become frayed, and things can really unravel, quickly.” ‘Lost Or Stolen’ chronicles lives undone by “people losing themselves in their phones,” Mould explains. From this focus, he pulls back and digs into “ideas about depression, addiction, self-medication and collapse… The words just fell out of me.” This anguished middle-passage of the album concludes with the cathartic ‘Sharp Little Pieces’, exploring “the end of innocence, the idea of a young child’s trust being violated. For those of us who lost trust as children, it disappears in a flash, and we spend years struggling to regain that innocence. And maybe it never comes back.”

The song ends bluntly (Mould says the album’s “lack of sophisticated ornamentation is key – I was trying to stay out of the way of the songs, to strip away all the things I used to think were important, all those extra colours and complexities. I didn’t want to get deep into decorating the tree. I wanted to keep it simple, to use the simplest words”), raising the curtain on the closing act. The theme here is lifting oneself out of the darkness; ‘You Need To Shine’ is a song about “looking for the bright sides, the good parts of life, despite everything that’s happened”, Mould says, a sentiment borne out by the song’s spirited holler that “all that madness doesn’t matter anymore”. ‘Thread So Thin’ is “about trying to protect the one you love, and trying to feel protected”, Mould explains, while the closing ‘Your Side’ is a powerful love song from the edge of the darkness, Mould howling “If the world is going down in flames, I want to be by your side”. “We’re heading into a great unknown here,” Mould says, of the wider geopolitical and climate anxieties that inspired these songs. The message here is, simply, focus on that which can save you and deliver you from this moment. “This album talks a lot about uncertainty, helplessness, being on edge,” Mould adds. “How much can we control? How much chaos can we handle? In the end, the answer, the remedy, is placing your trust in unconditional love.”

Mould knows Here We Go Crazy is an album freighted with darkness; “There’s soothing melodies, and there’s lyrical discomfort,” he deadpans. “It’s manic, frantic, complex.” But no one ever came to Bob Mould for good news, for the easy answers. Pop music runs through his veins, as surely as the electricity that drives his chiming hooks into the realms of distortion, but he’s here to give you the truth, his truth. To give you songs that ring true when howled against a tornado of guitar, that compress all that “lifetime emotional content” into some kind of sonic diamond. There’s eleven of those precious gems here, sculpted to make the heaviness easier to bear, somehow. Treasure them.

J. Robbins is an independent music lifer. Starting out at the end of the 1980s playing bass in the final and longest-tenured lineup of DC hardcore mainstays Government Issue, he went on to gain prominence in the 90s as the singer/ guitarist of the prolific and widely-traveled indie rock band Jawbox. That band’s sound developed to become a template for most of J’s later work: passionate and tuneful vocals set to driven guitars that swing between melody and clashing dissonance, atop complex and driving rhythms, abrasive post punk and melodic guitar pop influences in an always uneasy alliance greater than the sum of its
parts.

Hailing from both the Appalachian and Piedmont regions of North Carolina, the Rangers have long held traditional bluegrass paramount, while possessing an exceptional ability to bring it down the mountain, and to incorporate accessible influence from all walks of the region. With the band’s last few albums, they have gained recognition from well beyond the world of bluegrass, earning a reputation as some of the most influential songwriters in Americana today.

Newcomer to this ship, Aaron Burdett, brings a soul-stirring element to the Rangers’ mastery of mountain music. Burdett is an award-winning singer-songwriter, and a student of folk tradition. He provides a fresh, emotional context to the songbook, which “can reach out and touch your heart or slap you in the face,” to use the praise of drummer and multi-instrumentalist, Mike Ashworth.

Steep Canyon Rangers is made up of Graham Sharp on banjo and vocals, Mike Guggino on mandolin/mandola and vocals, Aaron Burdett on guitar and vocals, Nicky Sanders on fiddle and vocals, Mike Ashworth on drums and vocals, and Barrett Smith on bass, guitar, and vocals.

Over the band’s esteemed career, the three-time Grammy nominees have released 14 studio albums, three collaborative albums with actor and banjoist Steve Martin, been inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame, and appeared on some of music’s biggest stages. In 2013, Nobody Knows You won the GRAMMY Award for Best Bluegrass Album, while 2012’s Rare Bird and 2020’s North Carolina Songbook garnered nominations in the same category.

Travel back in time to the 1960’s for a fabulous evening of music and entertainment, reminiscent of a Frank Sinatra performance at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. Song stylist Jack Garrett and the amazing Atomic Wise Guys perform Sinatra’s classic hits, including “Fly Me to the Moon,” “My Way,” “One for My Baby (One More for the Road),” “Summer Wind,”“Nice N Easy,” “New York, New York” and many more. As a bonus, Jack and his ten-piece band perform hits from some of Frank Sinatra’s friends such as Tony Bennett, Frankie Valli, Dean Martin and Bobby Darin.

Featuring custom-written, deeply authentic band arrangements to reproduce the original Sinatra recordings, Let Me Be Frank is a fast paced, high-energy show including audience interaction and interesting information about Frank, both the man and his music.

The Atomic Wise Guys
Brian Cashwell – Pianist – Keyboard
Michael Sharfe – Bassist
Jim Leslie – Drummer – Music Director
Bill Dixon – Trombone – Trumpet – Music Arranger
Jeff Folkens – Lead Trumpet
Christopher Jeffery – Jazz Trumpet
Grant “King” Koeller – Tenor Sax
Jeff Spurlock – Alto Sax
Terry Staten – Baritone Sax
Jack Garrett – Vocalist