Indian stand-up comedian and writer Krish Mohan avoids the easy jokes, choosing instead to build funny stories by forcing the audience into his shoes. His 2016 album, How Not To Fit In, runs through a list of awkward topics such as a dolphin with six arms, the lack of originality in racism and interpreting American culture through episodes of “Baywatch.” With perfect timing, Mohan delivers rants on religion, immigration, relationships, politics and social issues.
Sunday, June 4. $7-10, 8pm. The Southern Café and Music Hall, 103 S. First St. 977-5590.
Some scour the beach for shells, Charlie Mars went looking for songs. Called to the ocean on his latest album, Beach Town, Mars takes inspiration from the Gulf Coast in depicting salty characters, lost lovers and a search for redemption along the sandy fringes of our Southern border. His songwriting carries such vivid themes that the king of tropical partying, Jimmy Buffett, heard a kinship in the music, saying he could’ve written the new Mars songs himself.
Friday, May 19. $18-20, 8pm. The Southern Café and Music Hall, 103 S. First St. 977-5590.
In his role as the general manager at Sprint Pavilion, Kirby Hutto interacts with some of the hottest acts in the music business.
Photo by Jen Fariello
If Gary Green does his job well at the Paramount Theater, nobody will know. As the theater’s audio production manager, he analyzes how sound waves produced by artists will be affected by rising temperature and humidity as audience members fill the space. He knows how voices sound in each microphone, and where the Paramount’s resonance frequencies are—these being the frequencies at which objects vibrate.
“[Audience members] only notice when things go wrong,” Green says, citing an experience when a digital soundboard crashed and he almost canceled Clint Black’s show. “They walk into a live concert expecting the sound of the studio. It’s a high mark to reach night after night.”
B.J. Pendleton is another local “sound guy” who determines what audiences hear, primarily for shows at the Jefferson Theater since it reopened in 2009.
“I love mixing shows,” Pendleton says. “I can make or break your show. You guys can practice as much as you want and have great lyrics, but I can throw that out in two seconds.”
Pendleton is joking of course, and says he wouldn’t do something that “horrible.” He first encountered the Charlottesville music scene in the early 2000s when his hip-hop band, Man Mountain Jr., opened for The Hackensaw Boys at a Liberty Hall Pig Picking. He says it was a full departure from The Roots-like vibe Pendleton’s band created. “It was us in the middle of a field playing on a hay trailer, people drinking beer, and a pig,” he says. “I’ve mixed [sound for] The Hackensaw Boys a million times now. It’s funny how it all comes together.”
He also manages international tours for artists including Amos Lee, Robert Glasper and Gregory Porter, while running his music production company, Pendleton Presents. He and his wife have a 9-month-old and 2-year-old. Sometimes, Pendleton says, he likes to sleep.
Kirby Hutto, general manager for the Sprint Pavilion since construction broke ground in 2004, says he can go to almost any show on the East Coast and find someone he knows working backstage. Though Hutto thinks the Pavilion hits a “sweet spot” and can attract a variety of acts, he says the space isn’t always easy for performers to visit.
Mishap stories include a bus driver who drove to Charlotte instead of Charlottesville, a raging alcoholic lead singer, sending a van to Philadelphia to pick up bandmates who missed connecting flights and tending to artists’ stomach bugs.
“We’re a challenge logistically,” says Hutto. “Once [the artists] get out of their trucks and into the venue, we’re going to do everything we can to make it a memorable, favorable experience for them.”
Keeping the artists and the fans happy is a priority for Hutto, whose mishap stories include a bus driver who drove to Charlotte instead of Charlottesville, a raging alcoholic lead singer, sending a van to Philadelphia to pick up bandmates who missed connecting flights and tending to artists’ stomach bugs.
He remembers Jack White refused to have the color red in his dressing room. No red cups, no red decorations, no red anything. When Jack White’s tour arrived, everything red was gone, Hutto says, thanks to the Pavilion’s hospitality director.
“You can’t get drawn into the madness when part of your job is solving that,” Hutto says, crediting the ability to stay cool under pressure and his team’s resourcefulness. “The rest of the stuff can be background noise as long as the artist goes on. …It’s truly an art.”
George Gilliam, general manager for the Southern Café and Music Hall, reviewed one band’s contract that included a request for a Tickle Me Elmo toy. He says strange requests can be a test to make sure venues read artists’ contracts thoroughly. “We did not buy a Tickle Me Elmo,” confirms Gilliam.
Green tells stories of two legendary bands he won’t name, saying one was “not happy” with the Paramount’s soup spoons and showerheads and another recent big-name act threatened the theater’s stage manager. Green says his 20 years of experience teaching Albemarle High School students with oppositional defiant disorder prepared him to deal with artists who are “prone to tantrums” and believe “the world revolves around them.”
Despite the occasional big egos and odd requests, most staffers feel fortunate to be working behind the scenes, where they sometimes meet artists they admire.
Mary Beth Aungier, talent contract administrator for the Lockn’ Festival and venue manager for Infinity Downs Farm, has extensive industry ties through her years as a tour manager. In the ’80s she managed an international tour for Carlene Carter, June Carter Cash’s daughter, and fondly remembers riding shotgun in a red Triumph with Carter and her former husband, Nick Lowe, then meeting Elvis Costello later that evening.
Hutto faced a humbling moment two years ago watching his musical hero Ry Cooder. “It was the most starstruck I’ve ever been,” says Hutto, who was fretting about getting his show poster signed. “I had to leave backstage because I was being too much of a fanboy.”
“Many of these people are pleasant, engaging, wonderful,” says Green. “You quickly become aware that they all sleep, eat and breathe like the rest of us.” After Crosby, Stills & Nash finished their set at the Paramount several years ago, Green says Graham Nash thanked every person on the crew. “We’re the first ones there and the last to leave…saying thank you goes a long way,” he says.
Old Salt Union performs Wednesday, May 10, at The Southern Cafe and Music Hall.
Old Salt Union’s hipster looks and laid-back attitude pair well with its love of high-energy, foot-stomping Americana music. But the band does all it can to buck tradition with unique arrangements and an original newgrass sound that recently earned the group Best Bluegrass Band and Best Country Band titles in the Riverfront Times’ Best of St. Louis edition. Harrisonburg’s Strong Water and Koda Kerl open.
Wednesday, May 10. $10, 8pm. The Southern Café and Music Hall, 103 S. First St. 977-5590.
Former UVA Corner Parking Lot attendant James McNew’s solo side project Dump often features guest appearances by members of McNew’s main band, a Jersey outfit by the name of Yo La Tengo. Why bother with the offshoot? As a subplot to YLT, Dump is where we get an ear-peek into McNew’s contributed value, closer to the lo-fi sausage-making, lovingly crafted on his 4-track in the early days before smoothing things out in studio on his later blasts of catchy, fuzzy pop.
Saturday, May 13. $10-12, 9pm. The Southern Café and Music Hall, 103 S. First St. 977-5590.
Singer/songwriter Sean Rowe will play The Southern Cafe and Music Hall April 29. Photo by Matt Dayak
Singer-songwriter Sean Rowe is growing his career with a grassroots approach. In addition to offering wilderness and foraging classes on his website, he splits his time between the road and raising a family. About a recent tour, Rowe says, “At every house, barn, chicken coop, apartment, loft and church, we made a real connection…” and impressed more than enough fans to fund his latest album, New Lore, through Kickstarter.
Saturday, April 29. $12-15, 8pm. The Southern Café and Music Hall, 103 S. First St. 977-5590.
Ships in the Night celebrates the release of Myriologues with a Witches Prom at the Southern on Friday. Photo by Tristan Williams
When Alethea Leventhal was a child, she’d sit for hours at the piano in her mother’s Charlottesville home, singing, playing chords and experimenting with sounds. She remembers obsessively listening to songs like Jimmy Ruffin’s 1966 Motown hit “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted,” pressing play over and over again and using that piano to figure out how and why exactly the melody in a chorus gave her goosebumps, or why a bridge’s chord progression wrenched her heart just so.
All of that practice examining the emotional quality of music would come in handy years later, when Leventhal, who records and performs music under the moniker Ships in the Night, was having what she describes as “a really hard night.” It was 5am and she couldn’t sleep. But she had a refrain in her head and she went to her synthesizer to work it out. “It ended up being a lullaby to myself, what I wanted someone to say to me at five o’clock in the morning when I couldn’t sleep,” says Leventhal.
That song, “Deathless,” is the first single off of the first full-length Ships in the Night record, Myriologues, to be released on Friday.
Ships in the Night album release party April 28
The Southern Café and Music Hall
“You’re going through hell / You’ve got to keep going / There is more than this” Leventhal opens the first verse, her ethereal voice drifting over softly driving, catchy synths and drum machines. “We don’t get to choose / Who lives and who dies. / But while we’re alive, I’m here beside you,” she sings. “Sleep now, darling, can you sleep? / Another day will come. / You’re still the one you were born to be.”
By the end of the song, as the sun begins to rise, Leventhal drifts, triumphantly, toward sleep: “When I rise from the ashes, when I rise from the grave, / I will be strong, I will be deathless.”
Like all Ships in the Night songs, the nine tracks on Myriologues are heavy in their subject matter: death, dark dreams, trauma, loss, sadness and “where people are left after trauma,” Leventhal says. In conversation, she remains largely private about her own struggles—“I deal with some topics in my music that are so hard, things that I don’t even talk about in my life very much, but in my music, they’re there and I just let it go.”
Leventhal wrote the closing track, “Across the Line,” a song about all the ways you can feel far from someone, for her sister who’s lived in Germany for 10 years. Their relationship exists largely through Skype and sporadic phone calls. They’ll be talking and the phone line will pick up another conversation, or the screen will freeze and Leventhal will be left looking at a pixelated, fragmented version of her sister’s face.
“We’ve had an interesting and complicated relationship over the years,” Leventhal says, so she can’t help but feel like these communications are about more than tech glitches and poor Internet connections—it sometimes seems like a breakdown of their relationship.
Once Leventhal started performing and recording as Ships in the Night back in 2014, sharing her songs with others who have experienced tragedy, sadness and darkness of their own, she began to heal. “Without the music, I probably would have let go a long time ago; I’ll be straight-up about that,” Leventhal says. “It’s not just about getting it out, it’s about recognizing that you’ve been trying and you’re working on it and you’re holding on.
“For me, [performing] is my way of standing there and completely baring my soul for everyone to see. Because what is the point of not doing that?” she asks in earnest. “It’s so easy to not share yourself. It’s so easy to not let people in, and that’s a shame, because there’s so much to see and know with people.”
“I deal with some topics in my music that are so hard, things that I don’t even talk about in my life very much, but in my music, they’re there and I just let it go.” Alethea Leventhal
What’s more, “we focus way too much on how to be happy, and not enough on how to be sad, on how to be sad and okay; on how to feel sadness and hold sadness and pain in front of you and not collapse under it,” Leventhal says. “If I can do anything with music, it’s helping people know that they’re not the only ones who feel that way.”
Maybe you’ve just been dumped, and you get into the car, turn on the radio and hear a song about heartbreak; maybe a family member has died and a catchy chorus makes you happy for the first time in days; maybe you’ve experienced horrible trauma, but you go to a live show and hear a melody that soothes you a bit—sometimes a song is exactly what you need, says Leventhal, and that’s powerful.
For all of its darkness, all of its weight, Myriologues is extraordinarily light. “It feels bright to me, hopeful,” says Leventhal. It’s an album about loss, but even more, it’s an album about how to not lose yourself amid that loss and remembering that no matter what, you’re still the one you were born to be.
Junior Brown plays Thursday at The Southern. Publicity photo
As a young boy moving about the Midwest with his family in the 1950s, Junior Brown became a good listener, and what he heard was country music “growing up out of the ground like the crops—it was everywhere; coming out of cars, houses, gas stations and stores like the soundtrack of a story.” Brown took that story and made it his own, becoming an accomplished guitarist known for his mastery across country genres—outlaw, Americana, Texas, neotraditional and classic—as well as the invention of an entirely new instrument, a combination of electric guitar and lap steel guitar he calls the “guit-steel.”
Thursday, April 20. $22-25, 8pm. The Southern Café and Music Hall, 103 S. First St. 977-5590.
Sallie Ford will perform Saturday, April at The Southern Café and Music Hall. Publicity photo
By nature, musicians draw from their emotional lives, consciously or not, to commune and titillate. Sallie Ford puts it all on her sleeve unabashedly on her new album, Soul Sick, a confessional that deals with vulnerability and rebuilding, offered through a British Invasion-meets-girl group doo-wop melding of garage rock. Opener Molly Burch left a Hollywood insider upbringing (with parents in the film biz) to attend University of North Carolina, where she studied jazz vocals before breaking
into the singer/songwriter scene in Austin, Texas.
Saturday, April 15 $12-15, 9pm. The Southern Café and Music Hall, 103 S. First St. 977-5590.
Having a daughter didn’t stop husband-and-wife duo Birds of Chicago’s busy tour schedule—they just go slower and experience the journey together. Publicity photo
Life on the road as touring musicians can be demanding. But long days driving and late nights on stage aren’t the only enduring requirements for the husband-and-wife-fronted Birds of Chicago. JT Nero and Allison Russell decided to bring their 3-year-old daughter along for the ride. The pair started touring with their daughter before she turned 1 and say her presence has caused them to tour smarter.
“She’s taught us to say no to some things,” Nero says. “If someone said, ‘Hey, I know you have this show in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but there’s a cool radio thing that happens the next morning in Austin, Texas, so if you drive through the night after your show you can make it just in time,’ we would just do it.” Instead, the couple finds themselves taking detours to parks and playgrounds.
Birds of Chicago
The Southern Café and Music Hall April 13
Nero and Russell initially met through mutual musician friends and reconnected when Russell was in Po’ Girl and Nero in JT & the Clouds. After crossing paths frequently, they decided to get serious about their own musical collaborations, as well as their personal life. The duo released the album Birds of Chicago in 2012 and married in 2013. Although initially just an album title, the name stuck as the collective’s form of identification. “I kind of like it because the idea was that it’s a collective,” says Nero. “It’s built around Allison and me, but there’s a kind of tribe of conspirators that are involved and the name hints at that a bit. But the shorter answer could have been: We really like birds and we’re from Chicago.”
Birds pop up as symbols in the band’s lyrics—take “Pelicans” and “Sparrow” from their 2016 album, Real Midnight. Listeners get touches of soulful gospel-tinged rock, but there’s a deeper melancholy vibe with several tracks touching on mortality. Nero says a large portion of the record was inspired by the birth of their daughter.
“In some ways it was the happiest year of our lives but I think when you experience that kind of happiness you’re also really aware of how easy it can get ripped away and how fragile everything is,” he says. “You’re that much more aware of the shadows creeping in.”
Just as they share an equal role in parenting, Russell and Nero also share vocals on the album. Nero is intuitive, knowing that certain songs he writes are meant for Russell to sing.
“Sparrow” and “Barley,” on Real Midnight were written by Russell, who drew inspiration from her Scottish-Canadian heritage.
“Her grandma grew up singing her a lot of the really old Scottish and Irish folk tunes and weird old murder ballads and things like that,” Nero says. “On ‘Barley’ she was really tapping into those old traditions.”
Birds of Chicago just finished recording Love in Wartime, produced by Luther Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars. Nero believes it has a more rock ’n’ roll feel and less melancholy elements, while thematically, it revolves around love.
“I think it’s the idea that there’s always wartime. There’s always forces out there trying to extinguish love. It’s just a weird self-destructive gene that humans have in them,” says Nero. “We wanted to write a record about love. I feel like people could use some good news more than ever right now with a good rock ’n’ roll beat behind it.”
