Tag: The Southern Cafe and Music Hall

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ARTS Pick: Willie DE

Four area songwriters—David Tewksbury and Willie DE (above) of Charlottesville and Roanoke’s Phil Norman and Corey Hunley will perform Saturday at The Ante Room. Publicity photo

When guitarist Willie DE walks onstage to unveil his sophomore album, Thunder Train, he will be taking another big step on a musical journey that cuts straight through Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall. As a young aspiring musician, DE made his first bucks while busking on local streets, and credits his membership at the Music Resource Center for opening up opportunities to bigger gigs at Floyd Fest and the Pavilion. DE’s new album benefits from his recent study of jazz guitar as he merges it into the folk-blues style of his original tunes.

Friday 11/18. $8-10, 8pm. The Southern Café and Music Hall, 103 S. First St. 977-5590.

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ARTS Pick: The Nth Power

The Nth Power works its groove from New Orleans at the Southern on Tuesday. Publicity photo

Indebted to the legacy of soul music, The Nth Power offers a listener’s choice of “songs that will inspire audiences to dance, groove, make love or just stand there with goose bumps.” Bound by a belief in the spiritual power of music and the logical beauty of math (the group’s first EP is titled Basic Minimum Skills Test), the NOLA-based quartet carries out a mission of love and understanding.

Tuesday, November 15. $12-15, 9pm. The Southern Café and Music Hall, 103 S. First St. 977-5590.

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Lydia Loveless gets emotional on fourth album

Breakout singer-songwriter Lydia Loveless trades in country-punk for pop on her new album, Real. Publicity photo

In our hyper-connected society, amid countless forays into reality television, the championing of celebrity culture and the crafted realities presented on social media, how do we define “real”? Its meaning is oftentimes fluid. Historically, the concept of authenticity has been inherent to discussions on music and art, but that can be a slippery slope devolving into matters of taste. Another facet comes from within: Under what conditions is a person exuding his or her authentic self? It’s this philosophical approach that Ohio singer-songwriter Lydia Loveless tackles on her fourth full-length record, Real.

“Real has a lot of different meanings and I kind of let people come up with their own,” she says. “But it’s also about, as a person who is, you know, pretty depressive and socially anxious and shy and closed off and trying to every day put on a show and people are always like, ‘Who’s the real Lydia?’ It’s like, ‘I don’t know.’”

Lydia Loveless with Aaron Lee Tasjan
The Southern Café and Music Hall
November 12

Released in August, the album cover features Loveless sitting on a sidewalk, wearing a deadpan expression and an outfit whose tassel hat is reminiscent of circus-monkey garb.

“That’s kind of why I’m dressed as a monkey on the cover,” she says. “Performance and, you know, sort of the charade that I feel like everyday life is. Not to go too dark, but what’s the real in anybody’s personality? Everyone kind of has different sides.”

Living out her formative years as a working musician, the 26-year-old has shared a different side of her personality with each of her creative outputs. She took up the bass at the age of 13, forming a family band with her father and two sisters. Having hit her stride on guitar by age 16, Loveless focused on writing her own music after the group disbanded, and she signed with independent label Bloodshot Records in 2010. Her first two records, The Only Man and Indestructible Machine, were wrought with the guts, snarl and twang that solidified her much-heralded brand of country-punk fusion. But when it came time to record her third album, Loveless scrapped a whole set of country songs she had written and started anew. The result was 2014’s Somewhere Else, in which her honky-tonk tales were infused with signature elements of pop. On Real, she cruises straight into the territory of sinewy pop-rock, tossing a slight nod to the alt-country moniker in the rearview mirror. She says there’s nothing contrived about this sonic shift.

“A lot of it was just boredom,” says Loveless. “We had been playing the same record for two years, so it wasn’t really like a conscious [decision that] we need to make a really pop-sounding record. It was just kind of a natural progression to expand everything because I didn’t want to do the standard thing that we could all do with our instruments.”

Among Real’s expansive harmonies and polished arrangements, Loveless has made room for the fierce wit, sharp hooks and unabashed honesty that have become her calling card.

“I grew up kind of in the heyday of emo and confessional bullshit music, so it kind of always was what I wanted to do,” she says. “I feel like everyone’s really open and raw right now, so I hardly even feel like I’m doing anything that brave anymore when I do that. I feel like we’re really in a pretty confessional era again.”

While the biting commentary on her songs is often straight-from-the-diary, Loveless says she also relies on conversations she has—and even conversations at the next table over—for source material.

“I think I find that the more personal my songs are, the more people can relate to them,” she explains. “But I’m also a chronic eavesdropper, so a lot of the stuff that I’m writing is not necessarily totally me, which is a problem when people go out in public with me. They’re like, ‘Why aren’t you listening to what we’re talking about?’”

As a performer, Loveless can be just as unforgiving as the songs themselves. Pouring energy into the vocals, brandishing her guitar and thrashing about on the floor, her live show is a display of take-no-prisoners rock ’n’ roll.

“It’s really emotional,” she says. “Performing is pretty draining and energizing at the same time, if that makes any sense.”

In fact, Loveless was a performer recommended to film director Gorman Bechard when he felt bored with music. Known for his rock-music documentaries, such as 2011’s Color Me Obsessed about The Replacements, Bechard made Loveless the subject of his latest work, aptly titled Who is Lydia Loveless? Loveless says the title echoes the question journalists frequently asked her when she was filming the movie, but it seems to be a further manifestation of the questions surrounding authenticity on Real.

“We’re both huge Replacements fans so we started off sort of talking about that,” Loveless recalls of meeting Bechard. “And I could tell he was working up to ask me, because he was like, ‘I just wanna do one more rock documentary,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, sure, I will do it,’ thinking, ‘How hard could it be to just be yourself?’”

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ARTS Pick: The Dexateens

In 2011, Alabama garage rockers The Dexateens were on the verge of a breakthrough when they broke up. The band left an entirely finished album, Teenage Hallelujah, unreleased, sitting in storage, collecting dust and tantalizing die-hard fans for the better part of five years. But Teenage Hallelujah’s moment has finally come, and the band has reunited to play songs—“Eat Cornbread Raise Hell,” “Alabama Redneck,” “Boys with Knives”—that are equal parts punk, rock and a laissez-faire study of life in the modern South.

Thursday, November 10. $10-12, 9pm. The Southern Café and Music Hall, 103 S. First St. 977-5590.

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ARTS Pick: Paulien

Paulien sings from the heart of American jazz, in French, at the Southern on Sunday afternoon. Photo by Wick Beavers

Dutch-born, Charlottesville-based singer Paulien brings an array of languages and talent to the stage through her French jazz interpretations of the Great American Songbook. Dubbed as a musical story, she captures everyone from Edith Piaf to Cole Porter in an afternoon performance to benefit the WTJU Jazz Marathon.

Sunday, October 2. $15-17, 4pm. The Southern Café and Music Hall, 103 S. First St. 977-5590.

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Wild Child fights through tough times and finds magic

Kelsey Wilson and Alexander Beggins are the founding members of Wild Child, a seven-piece fusion rock band from Austin, Texas. Publicity photo

The sound of Wild Child is hardly categorical. With horns and strings, it’s orchestral; with tap-your-feet basslines, it’s all groove; with ukelele-based riffs, it’s easy listenin’; and with bare piano arrangements, it’s full of soul. Fronted by Kelsey Wilson (vocals, violin) and Alexander Beggins (vocals, ukelele), the Texas indie- pop outfit has honed its blend of effervescent tunes for the past six years. Lyrically deep and sonically infectious, thus is the magic of Wild Child.

“That’s my favorite juxtaposition with our band, that we talk about some seriously heavy stuff in the lightest possible setting with smiles on our face,” Beggins says. “We’re talking about things that aren’t fun but we’re having fun doing it.”

The band’s spirit embodies the polarities that attract us to music in the first place. Whether it’s the soundtrack to your weekend dance party or the backdrop of your mid-week pity party, music is healing and it’s meant to get lost in. Wilson understands this function of songwriting. Much of the material for Wild Child’s latest album, Fools (2015), stemmed from personal life events: The dissolution of her engagement came during the same week her parents announced their split.

“At the time, you just think like it’s our creative outlet: It’s how we get over things, it’s how we process things,” she says. “For our first record, Pillow Talk, we were just processing these things for ourselves—it wasn’t for anyone.”

But in the four years since Pillow Talk’s release, Wild Child’s tour hustle has generated a buzz. This time around, Wilson’s songwriting is being received by a dedicated audience.

“This is a unique situation where I’m dealing with ridiculous stuff and I’m singing about it every single day,” she says. “But it helps me because it’s such a serious and honest place that I have to go to that I can’t just go through the motions. I have to get into it.”

A perfect example, she says, is when the band performs the track “Break Bones” from Fools. The song outlines that moment when you realize that a relationship is over, but are having trouble letting go. Accompanied by piano, Wilson’s pure vocal rings out: “It’s getting too hard to pretend / Too much to say I can’t contend / There is more breaking here than we could ever mend.”

“It doesn’t feel good unless I’m really sad by the end of it and then I know that we did the song justice,” Wilson says. “And there will be some nights where it’s insanely hard.”

That’s where Beggins comes in, relieving anxiety and tension. Wilson recalls the show they played on Valentine’s Day.

“It’s like the last thing I wanna do is get up on stage and try and act super happy and jolly and sing these fucking songs ever again,” she says. “And he just took it upon himself to like make me laugh the whole set. He took a roll of tape from the sound guy and was like, ‘Let’s see how long this tape is,’ and made the crowd unroll it…The whole show was so weird but it got me through the whole thing. And people in the audience had fun, too, because they were thoroughly confused the whole time.”

Wild Child
The Southern Café & Music Hall
September 29

Beggins and Wilson met while touring as backup musicians for a mutual friend, and the creative connection was practically instantaneous.

“I didn’t know how to finish a song or write a complete one until I met Alexander,” Wilson says.

She estimates that the two wrote their first song together, “That’s What She Say,” in less than 20 minutes—and they haven’t stopped writing since. After recruiting friends to fill out the songs, Wild Child was born.

“We could actually do everything that the other one wasn’t comfortable with,” Wilson says. “I can have a million melodies floating around in my head, but I never know how to put ’em down, what to do with them. But the second Alexander starts playing a riff, I just know what happens.”

When writing Fools, Beggins and Wilson extended their collaborative approach, relying on the rest of their bandmates to achieve the right sound.

“As a band of seven, we really came together on this album,” Beggins says. “[Kelsey and I] provided the skeletons and framework for this, but this was the first album where we really meshed together.”

But the key to crafting any Wild Child song is to keep the band’s essence at the forefront.

“We take these songs [as] a go-crazy release, not as a let’s-dwell-on-these-horrible-things-that-happened,” Wilson says. “It’s more like, let’s take these things that happened, make a badass song out of it and then rage every night with a crowd of people who have been through the same shit as you.”

Contact Desiré Moses at arts@c-ville.com.

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ARTS Pick: Sawyer Fredericks

Sawyer Fredericks released his first album of original material, A Good Storm, in May and is supporting the album on well-known stages around the country. Publicity photo

Unassuming upstate New York farm boy Sawyer Fredericks broke onto the national scene after winning star-maker reality TV show “The Voice,” under the guidance of coach Pharrell Williams. The contemporary folk singer won the hearts of fans with Ray LaMontagne and Neil Young tunes channeled preciously through his boyish, soulful style.

Saturday, September 3. $20, 8pm. The Southern Café and Music Hall, 103 S. First St. 977-5590.

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Steve Gunn captures the road well-traveled

Steve Gunn brings a full band and his simple-yet-expansive musical landscapes to the Southern on Monday. Publicity photo.

The magnetism of life on the open road has a long-standing mythos in American popular culture. Wide-eyed travelers were encouraged to get their kicks on “Route 66” in the blues standard first recorded by Nat King Cole in 1946. Sal and Dean’s cross-country pursuits defined a generation in Jack Kerouac’s beat manifesto while the frenetic image of Raoul Duke barreling down the desert highway with drug-induced fervor in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas marked a seminal turning point in literature.

On his new record, Eyes on the Lines, guitar virtuoso Steve Gunn picks up the mantle in a meditation on exploration and adventure. Unlike the paths taken by Kerouac’s or Thompson’s protagonists, his trip evokes a warm sense of aimlessness, one where the car is set to cruise, the windows are down and the sun gives way to a lilting breeze. “Take your time, ease up and waste the day,” Gunn encourages in his rich baritone on the album’s opening track, “Ancient Jules.” Driven by a soaring riff and interlocking melodies, the song crescendos with a masterful solo and fades into reverie. It’s a tune to get lost in, harkening back to the time you “slept in the grass / sky turned gray.” The rest of the album follows suit: carefree, bold sentiments accompanied by layered, controlled guitar work.

“A memory flash up into the hill / We’ll make the drop by night,” Gunn sings on “The Drop”—a nod to trucker culture inspired by his time traveling around England, where he observed truck drivers at British rest stops.

“The drop, basically, was trucker slang for location,” says Gunn. “For their destination, their goal to where they need to get.”

Although Eyes on the Lines is a collection of songs bursting with momentum that propels the listener forward, the drop is unknown. Here, it doesn’t necessarily matter where you’re going; it’s how you get there. This concept is mirrored in Gunn’s approach to writing music, which he says is heavily influenced by the philosophies of minimalist artists.

“People like Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt, where they kind of simplify what they’re doing and really focus on this gesture and, you know, that kind of process is almost as important as the result,” says Gunn. “I think about music in that way and I like to get kind of deep into it and, you know, really work a lot with repetition and cyclical elements of music.”

His lyrical work is no exception. The characters in his songs change direction, retrace their steps and seek different paths. Meanwhile, the album title is a double entendre, drawing on its minimalist inspiration while never losing sight of the road.

“It has a multiple meaning,” Gunn says. “There’s that idea of like white line fever, where you’re staring at the road for too long and you kind of become sort of hypnotized by it.”

Gunn grew up in Philadelphia, where he became immersed in the rich music scene and got his start in a punk band.

“I was lucky enough to be in a town where there was a great guitar store, where I took lessons and I also had pretty close access to the city,” he says. “My whole kind of musical world really opened up when I was old enough to kind of go around by myself and check stuff out. And then there’s also a lot of great bands in Philadelphia so I got to meet a lot of musicians and play a lot of shows and kind of figure out how to play live and all that stuff.”

In his own work, Gunn draws on folk, jazz, blues and more. He credits his parents for his expansive musical palette.

“My parents were around in the ’60s and they were really into soul music and there were a lot of DJs and bands that came through,” he says. “We always had music on in the house.”

Eyes on the Lines is Gunn’s eighth solo effort, but it’s his debut on indie stalwart Matador Records. With a career that spans more than a decade, his musical output is as diverse as his influences. He’s been a solo instrumentalist, one-half of the Gunn-Truscinski Duo, a guitarist in Kurt Vile’s The Violators and a collaborator with Mike Cooper as well as old-time band the Black Twig Pickers. It wasn’t until 2013’s Time Off that he began singing. The follow-up, Way Out Weather (2014), received critical acclaim and was his first album to feature a full band—a sound that he returns to on Eyes. Since finding his voice, Gunn has opted to write lyrics from the viewpoint of a narrator.

“It’s something that as a songwriter I feel is important,” he says. “[To] look at other people and sing about…what they’re thinking about. And maybe certain people who don’t necessarily wanna tell their own story—that have probably a more interesting story than most people—kind of the hidden treasures of the peripheral world. For me, it’s all about working and playing…absorbing my surroundings and reflecting it back out.”