undefined - eTown Live Taping with Los Lobos and Courtney Marie Andrews
eTown Live Taping with Los Lobos and Courtney Marie Andrews
Details:
Doors: 6 p.m. Show: 7 p.m. All Ages Welcome No Refunds or Exchanges With every eTown ticket purchase, you're supporting the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. eTown donates $1 per ticket to Conscious Alliance, aiding hunger relief, youth programs and sustainable solutions for the Oglala Lakota Nation. More than just a regular concert, eTown Radio Tapings are a unique live experience! The show includes performances and interviews with both of our visiting artists, and an interview segment with changemakers from our local and national community who are doing their part to make the world a better place. As an attendee, you serve as a vital part of our eTown show, which will be broadcast across the country on our affiliate radio stations and all streaming platforms. Listen for your cheers on the radio, and to hear how it all comes together, in just a few weeks following the night! Cell phone use, photos (from phones and professional cameras), and audio and video recording are all strictly prohibited during the radio taping. Thanks for your understanding, and for your help in allowing the artists and audience to be present for this special evening together! About Los Lobos: It’s a matter of time. 50 years to be exact. And in that time Los Lobos have created an unprecedented body of work, a legacy of greatness. The numbers are staggering: 100+ gigs a year for five decades running, crossing millions of miles to rock millions of fans. And that’s just at the live shows. In between they’ve recorded 17 studio albums, 7 live LPs, 3 compilations, 2 EPs, 2 DVDs, and contributed 40+ guest appearances on their friends’ recordings—all garnering 4 Grammys, an Austin City Limits Hall of Fame induction, the ALMA Ritchie Valens Pioneer Award, NEA and Hispanic Heritage Foundation Honors, Congressional recognitions, plus countless “Keys to the City” and “Los Lobos Day” celebrations. And those are just a few of the highlights. But beyond all the hoopla and applause (and the source of it all, really) is the tremendous heart. Rather, hearts. Cinco corazones. Five blood brothers who have dedicated their off-stage time to helping others, working for peace and justice, penning some of the most literate and important music of their time, transforming the hard cries from the East L.A. barrio into songs of hope, tales of common folk finding ways to endure. The young wolves were weaned on late-night radio’s soul, R&B, and doo-wop. Were cured through the African-American currents of the blues, jazz, and rock ‘n’ roll. An amalgam. As proud Chicanos, their songs have always glistened with the distillation from their Mexican and Latin American roots—nourished by Norteña and rancheras, buoyed by bolero and cumbias, soaring on the rhythms of son huasteco and son jarocho. Los Lobos have helped spread the rich diversity of cultures across every continent, throughout the global community.
Kids in Antwerp now know about Aztlán. Residents of Luxor and Ghana are crooning Lalo Guerrero. People from Laos and Bulgaria are belting “La Bamba”—all thanks to The Wolves as cultural ambassadors. Talk about a living legacy. Talk about a productive half century. And in the true rebel spirit, they did it all on their own terms, against formula. For the ages. To our delight.
Quite simply, they are one of the tightest, one of the best, one of the most prolific bands ever. And, amazingly, with the original founding members as the pack the entire time. Unprecedented. As their liner notes put it, quite simply: “Los Lobos still are David Hidalgo, Louie Pérez, Jr., Cesar Rosas, Conrad Lozano, Steve Berlin.”
About Courtney Marie Andrews:
Valentine is “a record in pursuit of love,” says Courtney Marie Andrews. But love, it turns out, “is a lot more than I gave it credit for,” she explains. “It’s built over years, it’s built with trust, with changes, it becomes something new and unrecognizable, the deeper you go.”
Written at the junction of intense endings and beginnings in her life, Valentinedemands more of those we love and reveals a stronger, wiser and more clear-eyed Courtney Marie in the process. It is both lush and elemental, precise in its construction but rich with sonic and lyrical layers. In love and on Valentine, there is no quarter for empty gestures.
From her very first recordings, to 2016’s breakthrough Honest Life, to 2020’s Grammy-nominated Old Flowers and her most recent Loose Future, Courtney Marie has been celebrated as an artist who challenges herself, and who finds new interplays of folk and Americana. “As a songwriter you can make the same record over and over again,” Courtney Marie says, “and I’m not interested in that. I make records to stand alone and stand apart from each other.” Co-produced with Jerry Bernhardt and recorded almost entirely to tape, Valentine features complete in-studio performances, hinging on performance rather than perfection.
“We thought a lot about Lee Hazlewood, about Big Star’s Third and Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk” says Courtney Marie, and that constellation of stars is apparent here. Valentine feels elegant, disciplined and balanced but never cold, always vulnerable and human.
“I was in one of the darkest periods of my life, and songs were the only way I could reckon with it,” says Courtney Marie. “I felt cursed, and the only mental cure felt like songwriting and painting.” The near-death of a loved one loomed over everything, and while that person eventually recovered from both sickness and psychosis, Courtney Marie was more sure that death was coming than recovery. Her grief was acute, volatile. The decline coincided with a new romance, but rather than lift her up, the two emotional poles seemed to bleed into each other to sow doubt, trouble and even obsession. “I was grappling with what I felt sure was death, and with the end of that relationship,” Courtney Marie explains, “while I was also grappling with something new but quite unstable. Here was this new relationship evolving alongside the collapse of another.”
The result was what Courtney Marie describes as limerence, but a somehow empowered limerence: consuming and fierce, piled high with insecurity and fantasy and filling every inch of a space she feared was hollowing out. It was painful, she says, and not far off from the pain of grief. But through her own exploration of music and art, Courtney Marie found a way to grow stronger inside this feeling. “I didn’t want to slink into my pain, I wanted to embrace it, own it.” The songs that emerged are devotional in their lyrics but defiant in their energy; it’s the very sound of a woman standing in her first wisdom.
That high-wire balance permeates Valentine, and lead single “Everyone Wants to Feel Like You Do” embodies it fully. A Petty-esque drumbeat marches under an indictment of the all-too-common type of man, the type who feels they can move through the world however they want without consequence. Here, Courtney Marie’s singing is classic honey-and-vinegar; she may sound sweet, but rest assured you’re gonna hear about it. “It’s this funny double-edged thing,” says Courtney Marie, “because you do want to feel like that person, but you’re not sure if you should because it’s a person so disconnected, without a care in the world or a care for other people. I played the guitar solo like I didn’t care in that song,” she continues. “I thought ‘I’m just gonna play it like I don’t give a shit what anyone else is doing.’”
When Courtney Marie sings “Don’t make yourself small, baby, take up space” on this summer’s “Cons and Clowns”, the softness in her voice lands as both a whisper and a dare. “Little Picture of a Butterfly” is another example, one where the reclamation of power in the lyrics (“Soulmates what a pretty thought / but either you do, or you do not”) mirrors the same in the music. “It’s such a trad song in a lot of ways,” says Courtney Marie, “but we added flute, we added organ and all these Brian Wilson harmonies.” Those additions set the song alight, building on the insistent tempo and bassline and climbing to an expansive, sky-high final act.
Album closer “Hangman” opens with an echo and a note that hits like an arrow. Courtney Marie sings insistently “tell me now, tell me now, tell me now,” but it’s not a plea, it’s a threat: I can love you with defiance, and without sacrificing who I am. It’s not “love me back”, it’s “love me or don’t.” “Keeper” is the only co-write on the record, and its backstory reads like a short film. “I was at dinner with a dear friend,” says Courtney Marie, “and I was really going through it. I asked her if I’m a keeper, and we both just started crying. We wrote the song then and there, line by line over dinner. I went home and put a melody over it after.” There’s a desperation to “Keeper”, even in its lovely, melodic sighs. It’s insistent, worn out from chasing a love that isn’t sure.
Valentine is also Courtney Marie’s most sonically explorative record. She plays flute, high-strung guitars and myriad synths, and she draws heavy inspiration from her art outside of music. Courtney Marie is a vivid poet and an accomplished painter, and across Valentine you can feel these disciplines interwoven, everything feeding the beauty and clarity of everything else. It’s unexpected, then, that Courtney Marie only recently appreciated the centrality of her power as a singer. “Historically, my favorite artists weren’t looked at as singers,” Courtney Marie explains, “they were looked at as writers. And I sort of dissociated myself from singing; I chose to use it when it behooved me, but I wasn’t connected with it.” But the more interdisciplinary her work became, the more that belief seemed to dissolve. “Singing is another stroke,” she says, “the most direct line to your heart.
Everything is color, texture. The way you sing can change everything, for both you and the people listening.” Courtney Marie’s voice is gorgeous and acrobatic always, but on Valentine it finds a new depth, an assertiveness that brings new dimension to its biggest anthems and its softest moments.
Courtney Marie is, and has always been, unafraid to say the thing. Her songs are challenging but compassionate, they welcome us in but push us to venture out. And this, in the end, may do the most to explain Valentine as both a theme and title. Courtney Marie rejects the objectification of love, the love filled with gestures and objects instead of trust, mess and growth. In doing so, she delivers her most beautiful and loving album to date.
