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The Songbird Series: opening nite! featuring DK&theJoyMachine, Karen and the Sorrows + Bird Dog + Janine Nichols SEMI-FREE @ The Way Station

7-9pm - The Songbird Series: opening nite! featuring DK&theJoyMachine, Debe Dalton, and Karen and the Sorrows

https://www.facebook.com/SongBirdSeries?ref=hl

7:00-DK&the JoyMachine
Genre: alt-folk and acoustic punk
For fans of: Amy Ray, PJ Harvey, Billy Bragg

A singer-songwriter known for “rocking out” on dulcimer, “DK” performs acoustic, punk and roots/Americana music with complex arrangements and a highly innovative and percussive style on both acoustic and electric mountain dulcimer (the "Joy Machine").  Mid-East Mountain Dulcimer champion, “DK“ also won first place in the Great Trails Dulcimer contest in her 20s. After being on hiatus for more than 10 years, she came back to performing with passion, writing new, innovative material and further pushing the boundaries on this traditional instrument.  Playing both acoustic and electric dulcimer, DK performs a range of material---originals, trad tunes with an edge, and covers, including some queer-core, with her work ranging from a punk sound (imagine PJ Harvey on dulcimer) to trad/folk and roots/Americana. Her material has been dubbed "quirky and smart" and her new EP, "Love Harder," released January 25th, 2013, described by VENTS magazine as "an album with heart, ...beauty, and passion. In every chord, note, or string you can feel poetry, sincerity, greatness... a record to closely pay attention to and be delighted by."

"What a treat! Last night I got to hear DK and the Joy Machine perform...DK commands both acoustic and electric dulcimer with graceful mastery. ...Beautiful sounds. Her original songs are quirky and smart, and her singing is just wonderful. Lovely range from soft highs to much deeper notes. It was a fabulous evening and I look forward to more."    (What I Read and Watched blog)

"Love Harder is an album with heart, feelings, beauty, and passion. In every chord, note, or string you can feel poetry, sincerity, greatness. Two pieces of evidence for this are “Siamese Twins” and “These Four Walls.” In the latter track, Dian takes the time to sing and her voice will immediately remind many of us of singers such as Dido/Dolores O’Riordan (The Cranberries)/Alanis Morissette. “Love Harder” is another song where string instruments combine to deliver something powerful, epic, and really experimental... It’s really poetic and captivating...this is a record to closely pay attention to and be delighted by..." (RJ Frometa, VENTS Magazine (Feb 10, 2013)

http://www.reverbnation.com/dknthejoymachine

7:40-Debe Dalton
Genre:  Folk / Antifolk
For fans of:  Pete Seeger, Drinking Songs, Stephen Foster, Outlaw Country
 
Debe Dalton’s timeless sound is evocative of the balladeering of Pete Seeger and the gospel holler of The Carter Family, with the grit of the city firmly under its fingernails. She is widely revered among New Yorkers as an interpreter of song and a master songwriter.  Tough but sensitive, strumming her "banjo power
chords," Dalton fearlessly embraces traditional music, but doesn't follow the rules.  Debe has two albums available from Kale Records, a fair-trade music label based in Brooklyn.

“A banjo-slinging rebel…at once gentle and fevered.” (New Yorker)
“A fixture on the Lower East Side for decades” (NY Times)

http://kalerecords.com/debe-dalton/

8:20- Karen and the Sorrows
Genre: alt-country, americana
For fans of: Dolly Parton, Ryan Adams, Wilco

Brooklyn alt-country band Karen & the Sorrows play “soaring tributes to lost love and… gentle and charming ballads” (Neville Elder, No Depression). Their debut EP Ocean-Born Mary is a four-part ghost story of “allusive, attractive but distantly menacing songs… Country keeps evolving, and Karen & the Sorrows are taking it to a place it’s never been before, a good and creepy one.” (New York Music Daily) The Sorrows are also hard at work helping to create Brooklyn’s burgeoning queer country scene by co-producing the annual Gay Ole Opry festival and the Queer Country Monthly series at Branded Saloon.

Karen & the Sorrows "make legit country that would make your 87 year-old grandpa from Texas happy. Well, not happy, because Karen and the Sorrows, as their name suggests, don’t write happy. They write lost and heartbreak, and goddamn are they good at it... [their] songs are quiet, but devastating, with a good mix of dirty electric guitar and absolutely haunting pedal steel....Song writer and vocalist Karen Pittelman has a delicate voice that just bleeds heartbreak in a classic 60s and 70s female country artist way. Seriously, if you’re a fan of Dolly or Loretta, you need to start listening to Karen and the Sorrows." -Fuck Yeah! Queer Music
http://www.karenandthesorrows.com
http://music.karenandthesorrows.com/

9pm-Bird Dog
Genre: Folk
For fans of: Neil Young, SE Rogie, Sam Cooke

Bird Dog plays original material drawing on a wide of range of influences from American and Irish folk, to 60's R&B and West African highlife. Principle songwriter Ben Chace is a filmmaker who has worked in New York and the Caribbean and his lyrics weave thoughts and images from those experiences with the usual trials and tribulations of love, heartbreak and the absurdity of modern life.
“The music will strike a chord with your soul.” Deli Magazine.
Bird Dog, a pleasingly chill, strings-accented Brooklyn outfit, finds a spiffy medium between indie folk and vintage R&B

birddog.bandcamp.com
https://vimeo.com/40153029

10pm- Janine Nichols SEMI-FREE
Genre: folk-jazz
For fans of: Van Morrison, Cat Power, Marianne Faithfull

String-based, but no bass, no drums, maybe a tabla beat box. Singer/songwriter/spell-caster JANINE NICHOLS opens up familiar songwriting forms to emotional free-jazz outbursts. Deeply poetiic and emotionally intelligent. Featuring the “restlessly inventive guitarist BRANDON ROSS (Cassandra Wilson, harriet tubman::the band, Henry Threadgill,, Butch Morris) and the fiery avant violinist CHARLIE BURNHAM (James Blood Ulmoer, Steven Bernstine’s MTO, Medeski Martin&Wood, Joan As Policewoman)

“Full of grace and gravity, Nichols has curiously been under the radar for a long time, maybe too long. Nick Cave calls her "My favorite American gal, she slays me." Lou Reed says "Bravo!" Linda Thompson said, "Sublime" -- and we agree wholeheartedly.Seek her out when you tire of product and crave art.” – Kingston Daily Freeman

"Singing in dimly lit tones reminiscent of a more supple, less damaged Marianne Faithfull...First Ones demonstrates Nichols' dark yet affectionate phrasing and lyric-writing, influenced by jazz, early '70s singer-songwriters and the late '70s New York City underground … She ranges from confessional to glib, whimsical to grim, ironic to romantic, and always thoughtful." - Peter Crowley

www.semi-free.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObT_hq7-2oA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD8bvUubCFY




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