Nels Andrews + Rebecca Loebe + Findlay Napier

Doors at 7:00 . Show at 8:00 . $25 advance/$30 door

Nels Andrews + Rebecca Loebe + Findlay Napier

“Where has this guy been hiding? In the library maybe.” -NPR'S Folk Alley

Although he was born by the sea, it wasn’t until he moved to the desert that Nels Andrews began writing songs. He sang them alone in a house constructed of mud and tires on the sage-brushed mesas of Taos, New Mexico where he spent his 20’s, airing them occasionally around campfires. Eventually he found his voice as a crooner of literary narratives and increasingly impressionistic story songs.

Nels has toured nationally and internationally since 2002 and has won prestigious songwriting awards from Kerrville, Telluride, and Mountain Stage. His international travels include sessions with the BBC’s Bob Harris, who named Nels’ debut album one of the best of that year.

Folk Radio UK says: “(Nels) combines deft storytelling with a warmth of tone and gentleness of pace .. awash with layers, metaphors and echoes woven into subtle, contemplative contemporary song. Like finding a seashell at the back of a dusty cupboard, putting it to your ear and hearing the ocean.”

Now, happily stationed by the sea again in Santa Cruz, Andrews has gracefully woven the morning fog, redwoods, and oceanside into his forthcoming record Pigeon and The Crow, produced by traditional Irish flutist Nuala Kennedy (Gerry O’Conner, Will Oldham). A songwriter’s record in the spirit of Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece with a breath of the texture, rhythm, and longing of Milton Nascimento’s Club De Esquina , Pigeon and The Crow brims with literary wordplay, mixed with some sway, some shimmer, and some sand between your toes.

www.nelsandrews.com

She calls herself a singer-songwriter, but as soon as Rebecca Loebe leans into the first notes of Give Up Your Ghosts, her first release for Blue Corn Music (Feb. 8, 2019), that definition starts to seem woefully inadequate. ?Loebe is not just another talent. She’s a talent — a sophisticated, mature writer with a relevant point of view and an assured, nuanced voice that’s both elegant and earthy, powerful and delicate, with a range and depth she hints at more than flashes. When the moment’s right, however, she’ll glide up a scale like Norah Jones, or drop right into a crag in Fiona Apple’s sidewalk.But timing and delivery alone don’t make an artist. There’s got to be substance as well, and Loebe fearlessly probes the rawest corners of her psyche to find it. “There's a lot of me talking to myself,” she says. “I’m writing a lot of empowerment jams these days, and I think it's because it's what I need. I've written albums full of what I needed to say, but this album is full of songs I need to hear.

”And now she’s on a guerrilla mission to share messages others need to hear as well. “I like to write catchy songs about topics that are meaningful to me, but use fun hooks to put words in people's mouths,” Loebe admits. “My favorite thing is to get people singing along before they even realize they're singing about women's equality or their own self-worth.”Inventively marrying elements of folk, pop, rock, blues and jazz, Loebe takes vocal left turns when you think she’ll go right, or shifts from breezy to profound in a single phrase. And each surprising twist makes her music that much more entrancing.

www.rebeccaloebe.com

As defined in the title of his remarkable 2015 solo debut VIP: Very Interesting Persons (No.2 in the Daily Telegraph’s top dozen folk albums that year), Scottish singer-songwriter Findlay Napier categorically commands musical VIP status.?He now turns those same supreme songwriting and storytelling gifts, allied with magpie-minded imagination and truly magnificent vocals, to his adoptive home town, on VIP’s hotly anticipated follow-up, Glasgow.

Napier’s own songcraft today vibrantly reflects this increasingly rich stylistic melting-pot – a mix he’s played no small part in creating, especially the cross-fertilisation between Glasgow’s folk and indie communities, as both co-host of a long-running open-mic night, and promoter of the decade-old Hazy Recollections concert series. In 2016, too, Napier launched the Glasgow Songwriting Festival, a weekend of workshops and performances which completely sold out its inaugural outing, and returns in 2017. In between putting the finishing touches to Glasgow, Napier also toured in spring 2017 with acclaimed contemporary protest-song showcase Shake the Chains.

Despite these ecumenical enthusiasms, Napier himself remains happy to identify as a folk singer – even if he does enjoy stretching the term’s already elastic parameters. “I do fit that one-guy-with-a-guitar template,” he says. As well as calling himself a folk singer, he simultaneously aspires to another, likewise timeless role: “I do love that old-fashioned, all-round idea of an ‘entertainer’ - I think it’s a brilliant thing,” he says. “But then that’s totally what the best folk singers are; they’ll have you in absolute hysterics, in between punching you in the gut - people like Loudon Wainwright, John Prine, Michael Marra: that’s the absolute pinnacle, as far as I’m concerned.”

www.findlaynapier.com