This concert is rescheduled from September of 2023. For anyone who did not get a refund or exchange their 9/2023 tickets to a different date, your original seats have automatically been held for the new date and your original tickets are still valid.

If you have any questions, please contact the box office at (513)977-8838.

A master lyricist and satirical storyteller, John Hiatt delivers songs filled with tales of redemption, relationships and surrendering on his own terms. Hiatt’s finest album is 1987’s Bring the Family; other catalog highlights include the pop and rock of 1983’s Riding with the King, the rough-hewn blues-rock of 2008’s Same Old Man, and 2021’s Leftover Feelings. His lyrics and melodies have graced more than 20 studio albums, have been recorded by Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, B.B. King, Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt and scores of others, and have earned him a place in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, a BMI Troubadour award, and a lifetime achievement in songwriting designation from the Americana Music Association.

Another Longworth-Anderson Series evening of great music, food, and drink! Complimentary pre-concert reception features live music by Sarah Asher, light bites from Ollie’s Trolley and N.Y.P.D. Pizza, and craft beer tastings from HighGrain Brewing Co.

Wild Creatures

Grammy nominee Neko Case steps out, cutting the sky and singing the stars, spinning fury and mercy as she goes.  She loves the world and wears her heart on her sleeve, but she might eat it before you get to thinking it belongs to you.

Wild Creatures pulls together some high points of feral joy from twenty-one years of solo work.  The Virginian marked Neko’s debut as a solo artist in 1997.  She delved into darkness in 2000 with Furnace Room Lullaby, scrawled Blacklisted in 2004, and recorded The Tigers Have Spoken live the same year.  In 2006, she dreamed Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, and in 2009 unleashed Middle Cyclone.  She plumbed her own life in 2013 for The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You, and raised hell in 2018 with Hell-On.  Now in her third decade of recording under her own name, she’s just getting started.

Is there another songwriter so fearless and inventive?  Bending decades of pop music into new shapes, she wields her voice like a kiss and her metaphors like a baseball bat.  She has cast the fishing net of her career wide—from Seattle and Vancouver to Chicago and Stockholm, setting up her home base on a farm in New England.

Gathering power year after year, Neko sings with the fierce abandon of a newborn infant crying in a basket in the woods.  Since escaping the labels of country and Americana, the gorgeous train-whistle vocals of her early career sit submerged in her later style, where their ghost can appear any minute.  When her voice jumps an octave, it’s almost visible, like sparks at night.  “I never knew where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do with my voice,” she says, “but I just wanted to do it so bad.”

The world tends to love women singer-songwriters most when they’re wounded and helpless.  Neko’s music spans a broader spectrum, from longing to malice.  Her lyrics evoke worlds, imagining a woman pilot ready to die, a serial killer, a murdered child, and a tornado, just for starters.  Is there any perspective she can’t write a song from or about?  “I am a man,” she sings.  “I am the man in the fucking moon.”

The Earth, too, and nature itself are wonders for her, from the dangerous attention of dandy wolves to a slaughtered tiger and birds frying on a wire.  The world is dear to her, but there’s a lot happening in it that shouldn’t.  It’s not her job to comfort you.

You might try to come away from a Neko Case tune without a head full of images—but it’s impossible.  Still, her songs won’t tell the whole story, rarely offering a panoramic view or a chronology.  Instead, she offers up a series of snapshots, as if from a crime scene, and leaves the audience space to inhabit the closets and cathedrals she’s built.

Neko seems to live to bend the shape of the melodies she writes.  Listeners might feel the music going in unexpected directions, as she looks for the note that will negotiate a truce to fuse it to her lyrics.  It’s not that you can’t find a verse-chorus-verse structure in a Neko song.  But you’re just as likely to find any chorus you hitch a ride with going off a cliff, or to hear a hook you think might be the chorus, only to watch it disappear.

Neko Case songs often exist with distinct sections that recall symphonies.  Changing from ballads or waltz time to a rock beat and back, the elements sometimes seem wired together to make an improvised explosive device.

Talking about inspirations, she’s as likely to mention Queen as Patsy Cline.  Her work covers a big canvas, including collaborations with dozens of musicians over the years (Paul Rigby, Calexico, and an assorted set of sidemen known as “her boyfriends,” just to name a few).

In studio, Neko obsesses over sound.  Always involved with how her albums were recorded, she’s seized and embraced the role of producer.  Standing halfway up a half-built stairway, she hammers nails into place as she goes along.  Despite blowing every deadline she’s ever been given, Neko feels in her bones when a song or a project is done.

“Music is so weird,” she says, “because you never arrive where you’re going.”  If her career were mapped, it might be a choose-your-own-adventure book.  She hasn’t masterminded each album with some absolute endpoint in mind.  “I’ve never been afraid to ask for help.  I’m able to trust myself in the moments where I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Neko insists on being larger than the narrow space that the world allocates to women.  But don’t tell her what kind of feminist she’s supposed to be.  There’s a famous dementia test in which you look at the pictures of an elephant or a giraffe and name them.  Neko Case is the opposite of that.  What if, by letting everything out of these cages, by taking the labels off living things, we had to encounter the world as it really is?  The wild things, the lost things, the things that scare you, and the things that you love—what if it turns out all that is really home?  What if, by writing about that, you could reinvent the universe?

What if some wild creature drags you out to the woods, but the woods begin to become the whole world, and your earlier home, still visible in the distance, suddenly seems less interesting than where you are now?  You might be in the middle of a Neko Case song.

She’s doing it on her own terms, but the legacy she’s building is one that can stand up to music made by any other solo artist in her lifetime.  Don’t look away; you never know what might happen.  “I’m just trying,” she says, “to be myself as hard as I can.”

Another Longworth-Anderson Series evening of great music, food, and drink!  Complimentary pre-concert reception features live local music, light bites from Ollie’s Trolley and N.Y.P.D. Pizza, and craft beer tastings from HighGrain Brewing Co.

Charity Fee Disclaimer (please include on links):  $1 from every ticket will go to Peer Solutions and support their positive youth leadership and development program designed to prevent harm before it begins and engage lifetime ambassadors of positive change (www.peersolutions.org).

“One of the most ambitious and literary songwriters of her generation” (Rolling Stone), Rosanne Cash is America’s foremost musical woman of letters, a literate and incisive artist whose poignant and distinctive vocals turn every song into a revelatory tale.  A singular artist at the peak of her interpretive powers, Cash has earned four Grammy awards—three for The River & The Thread (2014, Blue Note), and 12 additional nominations.  Among many other accolades, in 2021 she became the first woman to receive the Edward MacDowell award for music composition.  Her acclaimed 2010 memoir, Composed, has been described by the Chicago Tribune as “one of the best accounts of an American life you’ll likely ever read.”  Cash was recently elected as an Honorary American member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

“I consider artists to be in the service industry; the premier service industry for the heart and soul.  I am curious to a pathological degree and the Sword of Time hangs over me, and those two things—curiosity and the hourglass—make me feel more urgent than ever to connect, to find community, and to create.  It doesn’t matter what the world thinks, it only matters that what is unsaid and what is unseen is given form and has a voice.”

Rosanne and her husband John Leventhal, the six-time Grammy winning songwriter, producer, and life-long creative partner, launched RumbleStrip Records, an initiative to reexamine and reissue Rosanne’s early work, originally released on Columbia / Sony Music and beyond.

The label is currently celebrating the 30th anniversary of Cash’s landmark album The Wheel with a deluxe remastered version and first vinyl pressing, and Leventhal’s debut solo album, Rumble Strip (2024), released 50 years into his remarkable career.

Cash and Leventhal are currently writing the music to the Broadway production of Norma Rae.

Another Longworth-Anderson Series evening of great music, food, and drink!  Complimentary pre-concert reception features live local music, light bites from Ollie’s Trolley and N.Y.P.D. Pizza, and craft beer tastings from HighGrain Brewing Co.

In 1994, in his hometown of Portland, Oregon, Thomas Lauderdale was working in politics, thinking he would run for mayor one day.  Like other eager politicians-in-training, he went to every political fundraiser under the sun… but was dismayed to find the music at these events underwhelming, lackluster, loud, and unneighborly.  Drawing inspiration from music from all over the world—crossing genres of classical, jazz, and old-fashioned pop—and hoping to appeal to conservatives and liberals alike, he founded the “little orchestra” Pink Martini in 1994.  His aim?  To provide more beautiful and inclusive soundtracks for political fundraisers supporting causes such as civil rights, affordable housing, the environment, libraries, public broadcasting, education, and parks.

One year later, Lauderdale called China Forbes, a Harvard classmate living in New York City, and asked her to join Pink Martini.  They began to write songs together.  Their first, “Sympathique,” was an overnight sensation in France and nominated for Song of the Year at the Victoires de la Musique Awards.  To this day, it remains a mantra for striking workers:  “Je ne veux pas travailler (I don’t want to work)”.

Pink Martini has sold well over 3 million albums worldwide on their own independent label, Heinz Records (named after Lauderdale’s dog).  In 2016, they released their ninth studio album, Je dis oui!, which features vocals from China Forbes, Storm Large, Ari Shapiro, fashion guru Ikram Goldman, civil rights activist Kathleen Saadat, and Rufus Wainwright.  The album’s 15 tracks span eight languages (French, Farsi, Armenian, Portuguese, Arabic, Turkish, Xhosa, and English), and affirm the band’s history of global inclusivity and collaborative spirit.  In 2019, Pink Martini collaborated on a new release with the international singing sensation Meow Meow, titled Hotel Amour, and also released two five-song EPs, Besame Mucho, featuring regular guest singer Edna Vazquez, and Tomorrow, featuring regular guest singer Jimmie Herrod, a finalist on 2021’s season of NBC’s America’s Got Talent.  During their pandemic hiatus, the band released two new digital singles written by Lauderdale, Forbes, and producer Jim Bianco, “Let’s Be Friends” and “The Lemonade Song,” which has over 10 million streams on Spotify alone.

Featuring more than a dozen musicians, Pink Martini performs its multilingual repertoire throughout the world.  Says Lauderdale, “We’re very much an American band, but we spend a lot of time abroad and therefore have the incredible diplomatic opportunity to represent a broader, more inclusive America… the America which remains the most heterogeneously populated country in the world… composed of people of every country, every language, every religion.”

The band made its European debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 and its orchestral debut with the Oregon Symphony the following year.  Since then, Pink Martini has played with more than 50 orchestras internationally, including Los Angeles Philharmonic, Boston Pops, National Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, and the BBC Concert Orchestra at London’s Royal Albert Hall.  Other appearances include a performance at the official post-Oscars celebration, Governors Ball, four sold-out concerts at Carnegie Hall, the opening party of the remodeled Museum of Modern Art in New York, multiple sellouts and a festival opening at Montreal Jazz Festival, and multiple appearances, including sellouts, at the Hollywood Ball and Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles.  In its 20th year, Pink Martini was inducted into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame and the Oregon Music Hall of Fame.  In 2024, the band is celebrating its 30^th anniversary.

Another Longworth-Anderson Series evening of great music, food, and drink!  Complimentary pre-concert reception features live local music, light bites from Ollie’s Trolley and N.Y.P.D. Pizza, and craft beer tastings from HighGrain Brewing Co.