Barna Howard Band // John Calvin Abney // Kasey Anderson
Event Details
http://www.barnahoward.com
The songs on Barna Howard’s second album, Quite a Feelin’, ruminate on his relationship with home. Now entrenched in Portland, Oregon, many of the album’s tracks immortalize and reflect on the Eureka he once knew, while others focus on the relationships that define his new home out west. Small town life has long been celebrated in country and folk music, but Barna’s knack for capturing his own deeply personal nostalgia resonates in a rarely universal way.
https://www.johncalvinabney.com
As the world loudly closed down in the Spring of 2020, John Calvin Abney’s new journey quietly opened up.
As his lease came to an end in May of that year, he made the decision to sell many of his things, pack up his car and sojourn west, taking up temporary residence in the rooms and garage apartments of a number of close friends. From the San Francisco Bay Area to Austin, TX, Abney began working on the songs that would become his stirring new nine-song album which is released this August, via Black Mesa Records.
Abney named the album Tourist, informed by the way he felt as he moved through the spaces of his temporary homes. “I felt like a tourist, but not in a gaudy, intrusive way,” Abney says of the experience. “I was a quiet figure in the background of town, softly gathering up scenery and stories, trying to learn how to live outside of the realms I inhabited comfortably when I was younger.” One of these places was south of Reno, NV where he was born, spending his early years in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. “Not only did I feel like a tourist in this world, I was a stranger in my hometown who recognized no one but the land.”
https://www.kaseyandersonmusic.com
Kasey Anderson’s final album, To the Places We Lived, became, by his own admission, “a sort of Chinese Democracy thing; I just felt like I’d never finish it.” Anderson spent nearly three years on the album, which features perennial Anderson collaborators Andrew McKeag and Eric Ambel, along with appearances from Sadler Vaden (Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit), Steve Selvidge (The Hold Steady), Kyleen King (Brandi Carlile), Jenny Conlee-Drizos (The Decemberists), Casey Neill, Kurt Bloch (The Fastbacks, Young Fresh Fellows, Filthy Friends) and others. “We started the record in 2019, and were close to wrapping it up, but then my dad passed away, and everything just kind of stopped.” By the time Anderson picked back up again, the world was mired in the COVID-19 pandemic, and Anderson’s wife was pregnant. “COVID had everyone at home, so I just started reaching out to friends asking them to play on this record; I scrapped a lot of what we had recorded and built the songs back up from scratch. I knew it was the last record
I’d release this way, do press for, and tour behind, so I wanted to get it right.”