JON HAYES & THE COMPANY W/ DEERFIELD RUN & WRITER’S ROUND FEAT. Jack Droppers, Pete & Bergie and Carrie Mcferrin
18+ Standing Room Only Show | 17 and under admitted with a parent or guardian Jack Droppers & the Best Intentions have released 4 albums in the last 8 years. Jack Droppers is allergic to guinea pigs. Jack Droppers & the Best Intentions have won a couple of awards for their last 2 LPs, received praise from critics across the world, and been featured in NPR music’s Tiny Desk Contest recap. Jack Droppers often feels sad when his favorite basketball team loses. Jack Droppers & the Best Intentions have toured all over the United States and have shared the stage with many Billboard charting artists. Jack Droppers has crashed two cars. Jack Droppers will be performing solo for this show. Pete & Bergie is a husband-and-wife folk duo from Kalamazoo, Michigan, comprising Chris and Hannah Peters. They perform friendly folk songs, drawing influences from 1960s and 1970s folk artists like Peter, Paul & Mary, Simon and Garfunkel, and Bread. Their music features pleasant vocal harmonization and intricate finger-style guitar playing. They have released several EPs, including “Pieces of Work, Vol. 4” in April 2024, featuring songs like “Claira,” “Best Friend,” “Keep Me Humble,” and “Radio Flyer.” In addition to their studio recordings, Pete & Bergie have performed live at various venues and festivals. Carrie McFerrin has been through it all: love, heartbreak, joy, pain, motherhood, personal and professional struggles, and an upbringing in northern Indiana. But she survives, she thrives, she persists, and most importantly for us, she writes songs of the deepest empathy and depth of feeling, and delivers them to us with a husky Michigan twang. Kinda country, kinda indie folk, all original, never one thing but everything she needs to say. Michigan’s Sweetheart belongs to the world, to her two children, and to her own restless muse. Deerfield Run blends blues rock with a touch of country and a dash of funk, serving up a tasty musical blend that’s irresistible to audiences. Hailing from Grand Rapids, MI, the band delivers strong original songs and surprising covers pulled from a deep back pocket of classic tunes. As a group of seasoned West Michigan musicians with influences ranging from Al Green to Eric Clapton to the Eagles, their powerful instrumental and vocal performances captivate audiences of all ages. Their debut, self-titled album was released in September 2017, and the group released their new album, Reckless, in September 2020. Jon Hayes with his soulful tones and a storytelling ability reminiscent of Bon Iver and NEEDTOBREATHE, this musician carries an unwavering commitment to authenticity and honesty. His mixture of storytelling and song-craft has made him a favorite among locals and Jon’s candid nature and humor have put him on a circuit of performing everything from house concerts and listening rooms to local eateries and festivals. His first album, “Between You & Me,” was a work of intimate honesty with his listeners, which was received well by fans, supporters, bloggers, and playlists alike, but he’s now returning with his next work: “Something More”. This project pulls in more of Jon’s influences such as Allen Stone, Gavin Degraw and of course… more John Mayer! CD’s will be available for purchase so that you can take this project home with you long before streaming services gain access.
Jimkata wsg Highdeas
18+ Standing Room Only Show 17 and under admitted with a parent or guardian Blurring the line between rock band and electronic act, Jimkata is onto an entirely new era on stage. Once again a quartet, the band has been proving that no songs from their extensive catalog is off limits. Described as “A hard hitting dance party with soaring guitar riffs and soul tickling lyrics,” Jimkata takes you on an emotional joyride before tucking you gently in to bed, still humming the words. With a life long friendship at it’s core friends since middle school, Evan Friedell, Aaron Gorsch and Packy Lunn infuse Jimkata, with an adventurous musical streak & relatable lyrical themes. Adding Cooper Casterline into the mix holding down the low end has allowed the band to stretch the music out in a live setting. Mixed in with the modern sensibilities & hard driven indie rock are influences drawn from the likes of Motown, singer-songwriters & even old country songs, where storytelling & a quick turn of phrase share priorities with melody & the beat. On the heals of their newest studio album effort “Running In Place” which releases in Sept 2024 the band has once again exemplified why they’re the best at what they do. With the most recent release they continue the successful building of a vibrant, grassroots fanbase and finds themselves all over the US supporting their most recent release.
DEHD with SWEAT FM and Merlin Brando
18+ Standing Room Only Show 17 and under admitted with a parent or guardian DEHD has partnered with PLUS1 so that $1 per ticket goes to supporting organizations working for equity, access, and dignity for all. www.plus1.org Cigarettes burn in the moonlight. Necklaces bang against bare chests. And on their triumphant fifth album Poetry, Dehd transports us to a world steeped in imagery. It’s a world painted in the sunset tones of summer romance and flickering old flames. It’s motorcycle chrome (“Mood Ring”), it’s fake Gucci Sunglasses (“Dog Days”), and it’s shaking hands before a swaying lover (“Hard to Love”). Across fourteen songs, the trio–Jason Balla, Emily Kempf, and Eric McGrady–throw themselves against the question of what it means to hope, knowing all too well that things end and hearts can break. “You can’t beat death, but you can beat death in life,” wrote Charles Bukowski and upon listening to this album it’s obvious the band has chosen to attempt the latter. After hitting a stride with their 2020 breakout record Flower of Devotion, followed by their radiant Fat Possum debut Blue Skies in 2022, Dehd did something different. They turned a writing session into a road trip. With a van full of recording equipment they headed to Kempf’s off-grid Earthship in New Mexico where they chopped wood to keep warm and worked for as long as the solar panels held a charge. They then traveled north to a borrowed cabin surrounded by the chilly waters of the Puget Sound, where the hours were marked only by the movement of the tide. On the way back to Chicago for their final writing session at the warehouse they’ve called home for over a decade, Balla and McGrady became stranded for days in rural Montana after hitting a deer and abandoning their van. This tireless sense of adventure, both internal and external, has become a trademark of Dehd over the years. “Eating, sleeping, breathing—our only purpose was to write,” Kempf recalled. And it seems in this place of quiet focus Dehd have achieved their most honest and vulnerable writing yet.
Hurray for the Riff Raff w/ Squirrel Flower
This is a 21 and over event.Standing Room Only One of the reasons you started listening to music in the first place might have been in the hope of finding the kind of conviction and fierce rawness evident in Hurray for the Riff Raff’s, aka Alynda Segarra’s, “nature punk” manifesto about survival, LIFE ON EARTH. A visionary musician, Segarra (they/she) is an outsider in whose voice you might find echoes of your own. On her eighth full-length album, Segarra is creating music of honesty and portent. If there hadn’t been a pandemic, Segarra might have made a very different sort of album from Life on Earth, which became the record she’s waited a lifetime to make. Like the rest of us, Segarra had the disconcerting experience of putting the brakes on life as they knew it in March 2020. “I need to keep moving all the time,” says Segarra on a Zoom call from their light-filled studio in the shotgun house they call home in New Orleans’ Seventh Ward. Segarra had been a human embodiment of Newton’s First Law of Motion even before they ran away from their home in the Bronx at age seventeen, illegally hopping freight trains or hitchhiking across the country in the company of a band of street urchins, sleeping rough under dense underbrush at night and hiding in trees for shelter. Coming from a fractured family, they weren’t quite sure what they were looking for, but they had the feeling they would know it when they found it. And they did when they pulled into New Orleans in 2007. There Segarra formed two bands: Dead Man’s Street Orchestra and Hurray for the Riff Raff, releasing an EP and seven albums with the latter. In 2015, Segarra temporarily decamped, first to Nashville, then home to New York. Her 2016 Hurray for the Riff Raff album, The Navigator, was a quest to reclaim her Puerto Rican identity. Each song segued into the next in a tight narrative arc, uncovering important hints through the lens of her ancestors. “I feel like I’m always leaving clues in my song, hoping my listeners will follow the breadcrumbs,” says Segarra with a short laugh. On Life on Earth, they just might. This time, she’s chosen a topic that affects us all: our relationship to the natural world. “You could call Life on Earth survival music for the end times,” says Segarra. “But not just surviving—learning how to thrive. The importance of adapting and learning from nature—those were the themes that kept coming to me.”
MAGIC CITY HIPPIES w/ Pink Skies
This is a 21 and over event.Standing Room OnlyShades on and shirts unbuttoned, Magic City Hippies generate the kind of heat that could’ve powered a high seas yacht party in the seventies or shake a Coachella stage next summer. If the trio — Robby Hunter, Pat Howard, and John Coughlin — stepped off the screen from some long-lost Quentin Tarantino flick in slow-motion (instruments in hand), nobody would question it. Embracing everything from AM radio rock and poolside pop to nimble raps and salsa, they lock into an era-less vibe with no shortage of psychedelic funk or hooks. The three-piece deliver the kind of bangers you can play on the way to the party, during the party, and to smooth over the comedown as the sun comes up.As the guys so eloquently describe it, they “give people a choice to enjoy this on the surface level, feel funky in their bodies, and dance…or go deeper into the music.”As legend has it, the origin of Magic City Hippies can be traced back to Robby’s days of permit-less busking in Miami. Eventually, Pat and John proved to be better accompaniment than his loop pedal, so the trio played regular bar gigs and built an audience locally. They formed as Robby Hunter Band, released the Magic City Hippies album, and adopted the title as their name. That LP gained traction in 2013 with syncs on The CW’s iZombie and Showtime’s Ray Donovan. On its heels, 2015’s Hippie Castle EP catalyzed their breakout as “Limestone” piled up over 21 million Spotify streams followed by “Fanfare” with another 20 million Spotify streams. They toured endlessly and moved crowds at Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Hulaween, Okeechobee Fest, Electric Forest, and Austin City Limits, to name a few. Along the way, the band also picked up acclaim from Relix and OnesToWatch as they dropped the fan favorite Modern Animal in 2019. When the world shutdown, the boys settled in different parts of the country (Rob “doing his Johny Mayer thing” in Bozeman, MT, Pat in Los Angeles, CA, and John still in Miami). Remotely, they wrote what would become their third full-length album, Water Your Garden, out January 2022. As things opened back up, the musicians put it all together in person.Armed with singles such as “Queen,” the falsetto-spiked “High Beams” [feat. Nafets], “Diamond,” and “Ghost On The Mend” Magic City Hippies are ready to heat up their next chapter now.
An Evening With Yo La Tengo
2023 Bell’s Beer Garden Summer Concert SeriesThis is a 21 and over event. Time keeps moving and things keep changing, but that doesn’t mean we can’t fight back.Yo La Tengo have raced time for nearly four decades and, to my ears, they just keep winning. The trio’s latest victory is called This Stupid World, a spellbinding set of reflective songs that resist the ever-ticking clock. This is music that’s not so much timeless as time-defiant. “I want to fall out of time,” Ira Kaplan sings in “Fallout.” “Reach back, unwind.” Part of how Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew escape time is by watching it pass, even accepting it when they must. “I see clearly how it ends / I see the moon rise as the sun descends,” they sing during opener “Sinatra Drive Breakdown.” In the séance-like “Until it Happens,” Kaplan plainly intones, “Prepare to die / Prepare yourself while there’s still time.” But This Stupid World is also filled with calls to reject time – bide it, ignore it, waste it. “Stay alive,” he adds later in the same song. “Look away from the hands of time.” Of course, times have changed for Yo La Tengo as much as they have for everyone else. In the past, the band has often worked with outside producers and mixers. Yo La Tengo made This Stupid World all by themselves, though. And their time-tested judgment is both sturdy enough to keep things to the band’s high standards, and nimble enough to make things new. Another new thing about This Stupid World: it’s the most live-sounding Yo La Tengo album in a while. At the base of nearly every track is the trio playing all at once, giving everything a right-now feel. There’s an immediacy to the music, as if the distance between the first pass and the final product has been made a touch more direct.This Stupid World gives your brain a lot to digest, too. All the battles with time drive toward some heavy conclusions. In the gripping “Aselestine,” Hubley sings about what sounds like a friend on death’s door: “The clock won’t tick / I can’t predict / I can’t sell your books, though you asked me to.” In “Apology Letter,” time turns simple communication into something fraught and confusing: “The words / Derail on the way from me to you.” Not everything is so serious, though. The absurdist “Tonight’s Episode” helps McNew learn to milk cows, steal faces, and treat guacamole as a verb. And somehow Alice Cooper, Ray Davies, and Rick Moranis show up in “Brain Capers,” all telling us time isn’t finished yet.So I guess everyone on This Stupid World grapples with how time keeps steamrolling and how we keep trying to do something about it. It’s there in the title, a weary but clear-eyed pejorative that suggests determined resignation, a will to fight despite the grim odds. It’s there in the title track too: “This stupid world – it’s killing me / This stupid world – is all we have.” Such realism leads to the resolute optimism of This Stupid World’s parting shot, “Miles Away,” which sees time’s passage and life’s impermanence as things to deal with rather than reasons to despair. “You feel alone / Friends are all gone,” Hubley prays softly. “Keep wiping the dust from your eyes.”
