Holiday hops: Craft brews and mountain views await at the Crozet Winter Brews Festival, a celebration of dark beers and winter sips from Virginia breweries and cideries. Enjoy toasty stouts, chocolatey browns, crisp ciders, and never-before-seen beers as you relax in a heated lounge. Lord Nelson and Matthew O’Donnell bring the tunes, and a variety of retail and food vendors will be on hand all day.
Saturday 12/4. $10-30, 11am-5pm. Claudius Crozet Park, 1075 Park Rd., Crozet. crozetbeerfest.com
Thanks, I’m out. Powder-dry turkey leftovers, crusty chunks of stuffing, gelatinous gravy, and pie that’s been hacked at all angles by a variety of utensils and fingers. This is the reality of the day after Thanksgiving. Get outta there before there’s another load of dishes to dry, and shake off the tryptophan at the Hangover Ball featuring Lord Nelson, Erin & The Wildfire, and Will Overman, three Virginia acts rooted in Americana and infectious songwriting.
Paul Curreri remembers getting rid of his CD collection. He and his wife, Devon Sproule, both musicians, were packing up their Austin, Texas, home to move back to Charlottesville in 2015, when Curreri realized he hadn’t added to his CD collection in a while. “There wasn’t a bad one in the bunch,” he says of the 2,500-odd discs. The collection “used to be super fun, and vital, and alive,” he says, but once he stopped adding to it, it wasn’t fun anymore. Curreri sold it all for about $400.
“Now we have Spotify, and we have Pandora, and [I have it all] technically, on a hard drive somewhere. …But then I open up Spotify and I literally can’t think of artists. It drives me nuts! It’s like I’ve lost my entire filing system without having [the albums physically] on the wall,” he says.
Curreri’s story likely sounds familiar, and it demonstrates how consuming and appreciating music has changed drastically in recent years.
There’s no shortage of talk about this on music blogs and in entertainment magazines, particularly how the advent of streaming pays artists only a fraction of a cent per song play. But how is it affecting non-superstar local artists, in a small city with a fairly robust music scene?
It’s hard to find an exact number for how much a single-song stream pays. “It is pretty meager,” says Alethea Leventhal, who records dark electronic, ethereal synthesizer lullabies under the moniker Ships in the Night.
Conversations with Charlottesville-area musicians of many genres reveal that for the most part, they’re not in it for the money; they’re in it because they have something to say and to share.
Curreri says that when he began recording and releasing music in the early 2000s, he got regular checks, for hundreds of dollars a week, from his distribution service, CD Baby. His records were well-received by critics and audiences, and he started selling enough albums to make his money back on recording, and then some. But just when it seemed like he could make a real living off music, sometime around 2007 the checks started shrinking. That was the year Radiohead released In Rainbows, not as a CD, but as a pay-what-you-want download, and arguably altered the way people thought about releasing and purchasing music. (The physical version of In Rainbows was offered in January 2008 through Coran Capshaw’s TBD label, and was certified gold with 500,000 copies sold by March 2008.)
Crunching the numbers
BuzzAngle Music’s 2018 data shows that people are listening to more music than ever, but purchasing less with each passing year.
701 million
Total album consumption in 2018, including physical, digital, and streams (up 16.2 percent over 2017)
5.8 billion
Total song consumption (27.4 percent increase over 2017)
809.5 billion
Total on-demand streams (35.4 percent increase over 2017)
121.2 million
Album and song sales (a combined decrease of 189.6 million—in 2018, there was not a single song that broke one million in sales)
Now, artists often record their music at a personal financial loss and rely on live shows—their cut of the door, plus merch and physical music sales—to make money from music.
Last year, one of Leventhal’s songs made it on to a curated Spotify playlist—a placement that Curreri likens to “getting on Letterman”—and while she only made a few hundred dollars from the resulting streams, she saw it as a channel to new ears. Perhaps some of those listeners came out to one of the 70-plus shows she played last year, or shared the song with a friend.
“That’s what inspires me to always keep sharing music,” says Leventhal. “Just that one person in a sea of many who it really, really reaches, and maybe helps.”
“We see Spotify not as a revenue stream, but a carrot to get people to come to our show,” where they’ll have a good time, buy merch, and hopefully see the band next time it rolls through town, says Kai Crowe-Getty, guitarist and vocalist for Americana/Southern rock band Lord Nelson.
“People want to experience things together, in the dark, with people they know and don’t know,” says Crowe-Getty. That part of enjoying music hasn’t changed, though he scratches his head at how some folks shell out $150 for a concert ticket, but not $15 for an album.
Indie rock band Stray Fossa had a few songs appear on various music blog playlists, and in November 2018, its single “Commotion” appeared (how, the band has no idea) on Spotify’s “Fresh Finds” and “Fresh Finds: Six Strings” playlists. Bassist Zach Blount says that while the resulting tens of thousands of song streams didn’t result in more physical or digital music sales via Stray Fossa’s Bandcamp page, “we have had people turn out for shows while on tour who said they had found us on Spotify and decided to check us out.”
Kate Bollinger, a third-year student at UVA, only releases her music digitally right now, with many tracks exclusively available on Spotify. She approached the platform, with its 87 million paying subscribers, not as a money maker, but as a way to get heard.
Last year, her song “Tests” appeared on a YouTube playlist with a considerable following, and was later added to several Spotify playlists. As a result, her songs now have more than 80,000 monthly listeners, and she’s almost certain that her Spotify artist page is what got a recent show mentioned in the New York Times.
Bollinger says that her Spotify success hasn’t resulted in a big check (or any check, yet), but it gives her confidence that music is something to pursue long-term.
Local rapper Kevin Skinner, aka Sondai, has previously told C-VILLE something similar: so far his 2017 single “One Chick” has more than 2.2 million listens on Spotify alone.
Curreri is now part of the growing group of artists, like Bollinger, that releases music exclusively online. He and Sproule have a Patreon page, where they release at least two new things—usually original songs, sometimes covers, videos, or even essays—each month, and supporters choose how much they want to pay per release. It averages out to about $400 a song, says Curreri, so while it’s not bad, it’s not enough to make a living. Part of why Curreri agreed to be interviewed for this story, he says with a laugh, is because he hopes a reader might think, “I’d like to hear what Devon and Paul are doing.”
Curreri implies that all is not lost—musicians are still making music, and people are still listening to it. He and Sproule have about 30 songs up on their page—making at least two songs every month “is something we would not have done otherwise,” says Curreri.
“It’s a huge priority for me. It’s our work, and our art, and our opportunity and platform to present something to an audience, to insert something into the universe.”
Hair of the dog in order? Raise your glass to an array of Americana artists from just down the road. The 2018 Hangover Ball is a collection of
three musical acts prepared to take things back to the roots of American musical culture. Featuring the folksy kicks of Chamomile & Whiskey,
Lord Nelson’s memorable instrumentals, and Saw Black’s narrative songwriting, each artist has something simultaneously fresh and traditional to deliver.
After a Lord Nelson show at a venue in the southeast, an audience member approached lead singer and guitarist Kai Crowe-Getty. “You guys aren’t for erasing history, right?” the attendee asked. “Every now and then,” Crowe-Getty says, “we have to diffuse a situation like that and stand by what we believe.”
Listen to Lord Nelson’s debut album The County and the forthcoming Through the Night, and it’s pretty clear what Crowe-Getty believes. Take “Virginia” from The County—it’s a horn-heavy and bluesy ballad with lyrics written from the viewpoint of one of Crowe-Getty’s relatives who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War.
“He’s asking himself, ‘Why the hell am I doing this?’” says Crowe-Getty. “It’s about his shame and regret about the war he was fighting.”
Through the Night’s “Safety Meeting” and “Southern Discomfort” stem from the experience of Crowe-Getty and his four bandmates—lead guitarist Calloway Jones and brother Henry Jones on vocals, keys and trombone, drummer Johnny Stubblefield and bassist Andrew Hollifield—watching the events of August 11 and 12 remotely while the band was touring.
“We wrote ‘Southern Discomfort’ after touring around the South and seeing Confederate flags all over highways,” Crowe-Getty says. “We rewrote it and let it sit for a while until this summer.”
“Stars and bars over 29, / just south of Lynchburg before the state line, / now they’re gathering in city streets / a lost cause it doesn’t know defeat,” Crowe-Getty sings in the opening verse between a heartbeat drumline punctured by progressively rising guitar chords. Soulful vocalist sisters Davina Jackson and Davita Jackson-Voit join Crowe-Getty in his staccato delivery of the chorus. Together, the song’s elements are reminiscent of a call and response—finding unity, harmony and artistry in spite of division and abrupt endings. They come together to tell an all-too-familiar story of shock and rage.
Crowe-Getty says the new record is darker than the band anticipated. In the two years between albums, Crowe-Getty and his bandmates came to terms with “the natural migration of life,” dealing with personal loss, feeling tested and stretched too thin. Crowe-Getty’s brother, Bram, helped found Lord Nelson in 2012, wrote and performed on Through the Night and ultimately left the band to go back to school.
“It’s easy to feel isolated or in your own little world when you’re traveling in a van with four other dudes,“ Crowe-Getty says. “It’s also wonderful and can put things at arm’s length. The past year was about reconciling that if we wanted to do this as a career, we have to make sacrifices. We all love making music more than anything else.”
Recording the album was cathartic for Crowe-Getty because it gave the band an opportunity to support one another and the space to process life changes.
“We were playing and performing and exploring and doing some weird stuff,” Crowe- Getty says. Through the Night’s “When the Lights Come Down,” for example, “started as a strummy acoustic number and turns into this big, weird Men at Work mixed with psychedelic vibe.” Jones found a groovy keyboard riff, and he and Crowe-Getty mixed in 10 guitars. They wanted to create a “ghostly kind of feedback” sound for the track, which they achieved by recording guitar on a cell phone and rerecording the phone’s audio.
Crowe-Getty says the band is pumped to play a hometown release show at the Southern on May 18, and “make it a really great party.” Horns from The Judy Chops and “force of nature” Athena Jackson will share the stage.
“There has been a huge swell of fantastic releases from the Charlottesville area in the past year,” Crowe-Getty says. “Charlottesville is a great incubator, and we love seeing our friends get after it.”
Whether you are thankful, guided by a dark star or happy pickin’ over leftovers, a live gig awaits that’ll shake off the holiday gravy and leave you grateful for the blues.
November 23: Thankful Dead featuring Bigfoot County and Mama Tried at The Jefferson Theater.
November 24: DJ Sir RJ’s Thanksgiving After-party at The Ante Room.
November 25: Hackensaw Boys and Larry Keel Experience Present: Home For Thanksgiving Hangover Pickin’ Party at The Jefferson Theater.
November 26: Lord Nelson’s Leftover Party with Gold Connections and Big Mama Shakes at The Southern Café and Music Hall.
November 29: Dark Star Orchestra’s Grateful Dead concert experience at The Jefferson Theater.
We’re 20 years in, and there’s a lot to celebrate: the best people, places and things in town—and us. Join the party from 7-11pm August 19 at the IX Art Park!
Your $45 ticket gets you access to music from Lord Nelson and DJ Derek Tobler, food trucks and booze (all food and drinks, including beer, cocktails and wine, are included in the ticket price).
Proceeds from the event benefit the Albemarle Housing Improvement Program.
FAQs
Are there ID requirements or an age limit to enter the event?
21-plus, ID required, no exceptions!
What are my transport/parking options getting to the event?
Parking is available on-site. If the lots are full, you can park in the Downtown Mall pay lots and walk over.
What can/can’t I bring to the event?
No one under 21, no pets and no outside food or alcohol.
Will there be long lines for food and drinks?
We are doing our best to eliminate the long lines. This year we are doubling up and we plan to have four bars, two beer trucks and additional food truck options.
How can I buy tickets?
Click on this link.