Here we go Sasquatch!

Tomorrow morning I catch a flight to Seattle to prepare for my first weekend at the Sasquatch Festival (celebrating its 10th anniversary this year!). Normally a standing work commitment prevents me from Sasquatching, but this year they were so kind as to schedule my conference in Vancouver starting the day after the festival ends. So some friends I will be packing our tents and diving headlong and happily into the fray.

This has long been high on my list of music festivals to attend, and I have never partaken in the stunning natural beauty of The Gorge (although I sent a writer-friend in 2009). As it has been every year, the lineup is completely marvelous. I jumped into the fest on faith and legacy without closely examining the lineup, and as I sat down in earnest to craft my schedule this week, I was left mouth agape in wordless pleasure. Holy heck do I get to see some great bands I have never seen before!

Here are my recommendations for this Sasquatch weekend 2011. If you are coming as well, please come find me and say hello, or if you are not, you can stream the whole weekend on KEXP. I may also have to get me a poster or two.

Due to several conflicts of scheduling (especially Saturday!), I may also need to find a way to clone myself, okbrb.

HEATHER’S 2011 SASQUATCH RECOMMENDATIONS

–FRIDAY–
Set up camp!
Biffy Clyro, 5:05– 5:50, Bigfoot
Bob Mould, 5:45– 6:30, Sasquatch
Death From Above 1979, 8:00– 9:00, Sasquatch
Foo Fighters, 9:30– 11:30, Sasquatch

–SATURDAY–
Seattle Rock Orchestra (Radiohead tribute!), 12:00– 12:45, Bigfoot
Alberta Cross, 12:00– 12:45, Sasquatch
The Radio Dept, 1:05– 1:50, Sasquatch
The Globes, 1:20– 2:05, Yeti
K-os (goood stuff), 2:00– 2:45, Bigfoot
The Head & The Heart, 2:10– 2:55, Sasquatch
Aloe Blacc, 3:00– 3:45, Bigfoot
Dan Mangan (yayy!), 3:30– 4:15, Yeti
Sharon Van Etten, 4:05– 4:50, Bigfoot
Wolf Parade (last show ever?), 4:20– 5:05, Sasquatch
Wye Oak, 5:40– 6:25, Yeti
Iron & Wine (never seen him, despite my love), 6:45– 7:45, Sasquatch
Bright Eyes, 8:15-9:15, Sasquatch
Robyn, 9:00-10:00, Bigfoot
Sleigh Bells, 10:10– 10:45, Banana Shack (!!)
Death Cab for Cutie, 9:45-11:30, Sasquatch
Bassnectar (fun), 11:30– 12:30, Bigfoot

–SUNDAY–
Typhoon (!!), 12:00– 12:45, Bigfoot
Wheedle’s Groove, 1:00- 1:45, Bigfoot
The Moondoggies, 2:00- 2:45, Bigfoot
Fitz & The Tantrums, 2:10– 2:55, Sasquatch
Basia Bulat, 2:25– 3:10, Yeti
Tokyo Police Club, 3:15– 4:00, Sasquatch
Other Lives, 3:30– 4:15, Yeti
City and Colour, 5:10- 5:55, Bigfoot
Archers of Loaf (Eric Bachmann!), 6:20– 7:05, Bigfoot
Flaming Lips, 8:00- 9:30, Sasquatch
Yeasayer, 9:00– 10:00, Bigfoot
MSTRKRFT, 10:00 – 11:00, Banana Shack

–MONDAY–
GIVERS, 12:00– 12:45, Bigfoot
Young the Giant, 12:35– 1:20, Sasquatch
Noah & The Whale, 2:00– 2:45, Bigfoot
Chromeo, 2:45– 3:30, Sasquatch
Guided By Voices (!!), 3:50– 4:50, Sasquatch
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, 5:10– 5:55, Bigfoot
Foster the People, 5:40– 6:25, Yeti
Surfer Blood, 6:20- 7:05, Bigfoot
!!!, 7:30– 8:30, Bigfoot
The Decemberists, 8:00- 9:00, Sasquatch
Wilco, 9:30– 11:30, Sasquatch

Whew. Right?!

And then in addition to all that, I also have managed to finagle in a pre-Sasquatch house show in Seattle on Thursday night with both Cataldo and Hey Marseilles (both recent faves of the highest caliber), and a post-festival club show in Vancouver with a favorite fellow blogger to see Bahamas and Noah & The Whale.

I am pretty sure I might collapse into a happy pile of musical satisfaction by sometime next week, so wish me luck. I’m off!

[pretty Sasquatch 2009 stage-view photo credit Dainon!]

now i’m pointed north / hoping for the shore

Between my falling so hard for James Blake’s swooping, androgynous take on Joni Mitchell, and the way I’m absorbing the new Bon Iver record over and over, you’d think I was stuck in some sort of males-who-sing-falsetto rut.

While I have been enjoying the voices of men with a more masculine register as well, James Vincent McMorrow does nothing to break the string here. This haunting song floored me the first time I heard it (listen to that wonderful build! and break!) and made me, in fact, wish that I had a boat and some fog to sail it off into. Been too long.

If I Had A Boat – James Vincent McMorrow

McMorrow is from Dublin, and I would totally set off into the Irish Sea with him. He just finished some tour dates with the Rural Alberta Advantage kids, in support of the worldwide release of his album Early In The Morning. That’s an album he self-recorded in five months in a cottage by the coast, alone and playing all the instruments, and you can sample more sounds from it on his website.

TOUR DATES with The Civil Wars here.

The Fuel/Friends Chapel Sessions with Joe Pug

Like his quick, punchy name, the music of Joe Pug can be deceptively simple. At first pass, one could be forgiven for thinking he is just another earnest singer-songwriter with a heart full of thoughtful lyrics and an impassioned strum on the guitar. But if you listen more closely to his deep repertoire (especially to these three songs that he chose for this session), dark and complicated themes begin to emerge out from the calico of words.

Last Saturday afternoon (with some sort of tribal pulsating student dance festival taking place right outside the heavy church doors), a handful of us gathered in Shove Chapel to record some of Joe’s songs in that vast silent space. The musicians asked if I had any song preferences, and I told them that whatever they would pick would be better than what I could pick. And perhaps it’s the storyteller in me, but in listening carefully to these recordings for the last week, I’ve seen a wonderfully strong narrative emerge from the tunes selected. A leitmotif, if you will.

This is music for wanderers who nonetheless miss a home; songs of an “optimistic sadness”; words for those of us who stop to think sometimes if we might be denting the undefined future with the necessary choices we’re making this week.

Joe spoke beautifully about believing in things when I interviewed him, and nowhere is that more apparent than watching him sing words like these. He believes things, and passes that on to the listener. They’re rending, these stories. And completely beautiful they way Joe tells ‘em.

FUEL/FRIENDS CHAPEL SESSION: JOE PUG

Dodging The Wind
The few of us there fell into initial silence of expectation, as Joe leaned into his harmonica and blew these first penetrating notes. The resultant ache feels like a scalpel. Maybe like a lonesome train whistle pulling me off somewhere else — no instrument evokes wanderlust more for me.

This song starts the session with the dusty-tracks theme of an itinerant drifter that would wend throughout the session. The staying and the leaving. It’s the song of someone just passing through, over and over again: “call that boy by his name, smile as he turns and he waves / don’t you shed a tear as he walks way from here, he’ll come but he ain’t known to stay.”

My favorite part comes towards the end of the third minute, when Joe’s voice starts to careen a bit, like steering too fast into a curve and starting to be overwhelmed.

In The Meantime
This particular song has been wrecking me all week, as it gently prods at the decisions that we make for now at the potential expense of later. This is the song where I hear “optimistic sadness” — a waiting for someone, a confidence in finding what you’ll need, and a crippling black-hole in your gut for now. You should know that Joe used to work as a carpenter before he became a musician, building houses and such. I hear this song drawing taut lines between the constructive, durable life of a craftsman and the itinerant, often-lonely life of a musician — “I’m dreaming for a living, I got no time for work.”

In particular, the fourth verse snags me, singing of prying up sheets of plywood from the floor to burn. “The house is out of lumber, at least for now I’m warm,” Joe sings, and “in the meantime, I should find another room.” A trail of ashes, the destruction we can wreak in the meantime, while we wait.

Hard Life (Bonnie Prince Billy cover)
Joe is touring with the uber-talented, impressively-bearded, former second grade teacher Tim Showalter who plays music under the name of Strand of Oaks (aka Chapel Session #4). The two of them asked me, “Can we do a cover song?” and I replied incredulously, “Um, have you met me?! Yes!” Then they told me it was a song by Bonnie “Prince” Billy they were considering, and I just about keeled over.

Joe and Tim harmonized so flawlessly on this ode to the struggles of marriage, toeing that line between submitting to our demons, our desire for faithful abiding love, and the desire to flee. Sounds pretty accurate to me. Aside from the aural perfection in the blending of their voices, I also enjoyed the contrast in the perspectives in the song – the married man and the unmarried one, both singing about how hard this life can be, whichever your lot. It’s a perfect bookend to the themes of Joe’s set when Tim sings “So let me go, lay it down / on my own, let me drown. Let me go, go where you don’t know.”

Also, the final bluesy guitar solo on this song hung with such a ripe melancholy, and left me breathless. Again.

ZIP IT UP: JOE PUG CHAPEL SESSION

That night, we had a house show at my place. As you can imagine, these musicians created everything a house show should be; all of us packed warmly and tightly into an effusive shoulder-to-shoulder bunch, with more varieties of Colorado microbrews in-hand than you could count. There were folks of all ages from 7 to 70, with smiles stretched wide everywhere you looked, and the furrowed brows of concentration you get when you hear music that really says something. Joe and Tim both cast a spell over all of us there.

You can see my photo album from the show on the Fuel/Friends Facebook page, and also some pictures from local supernova Lindsay McWilliams here. Tiffiny from The Ruckus came down from Denver and posted a review of the evening here, also with gorgeous pictures.

All of us agree, it was a very good night.

(oh! and there are still a few of these terrific house show posters left for sale, if’n you might want one for your wall – screenprinted and sparkly, two different designs)

House pic by Lindsay, poster pic by Tiffiny. Church interior photo above by Conor from the amazing Blank Tape Records, who is responsible with his brother Ian for all the excellent audio we all enjoy in these Chapel Sessions. You guys rock.

brighten my northern sky

Northern Sky (Nick Drake) – Denison Witmer

been a long time that I’ve waited
been a long that I’ve known
been a long time that I’ve wondered through the people I have known

oh, if you would and you could, come blow your horn on high

[via]

and i never know when i’m holding you too tight

The last few nights I’ve been having trouble turning my mind off to go to sleep. So I decided to remember the simple, numbing glory of putting on a pair of headphones and letting the aural assault mute everything else clanking and pinging around in my head, high school style. Somehow as I’ve grown up, I’ve moved away from the falling-asleep-to-music, whether it was from sleeping beside someone, or wanting to be awake enough to hear the sounds in my house. As I’ve reclaimed and grown comfortable moving away from both of those, I’m taking back the headphones to sleep this week.

Last night my pick was the newest Rural Alberta Advantage album (which also made up a major part of my favorite SXSW moments), and the song that did it for me over and over again was “Muscle Relaxants.” It’s like certain songs from The National, where the drumbeat has an analgesic effect. I mean that quite literally. It uncaps some sort of pleasure receptors in my brain and a fuzz descends.

Muscle Relaxants – Rural Alberta Advantage

The entire album Departing is completely fantastic (other favorite tracks include “North Star,” “Barnes Yard,” and the terrific “Stamp,” but who’s counting). Like the feeling of the fog-blanketed desolation in the cover art, this is a record chronicling the holding tight and the letting go in nearly every song, every line. I plan to devote several more sleepless nights to it, at minimum.

It’s out now on Saddle Creek.

[rad poster by Brian Danaher]

believe in solid skies and slate blue earth below

This Monday morning feels like that quiet moment when you are sitting by the ocean with your feet in the sand, and it is right after the wave crashes in. The water slides flat into silence for an eerily reflective second, thin across the sand as the foam froths in swirls. There is a trough of silence there before the next wave comes roaring in.

This is a song is about assurances learned quietly, and about taking a break from all of the trying. And it is completely marvelous, track 12 on the latest Mountain Goats record All Eternals Deck (Merge Records). Darnielle is one of my favorite songwriters, and this one feels like an anthem.

This was a wonderfully connective weekend, full of warm rich music and terrific people. I remember telling a friend on Saturday at my Joe Pug house show that it was a night where I just felt for a while like everything was going to be okay.

This is a song for that.

Never Quite Free – Mountain Goats

It’s so good to learn that right outside your window
there’s only friendly fields and open roads
you’ll sleep better when you think
you’ve stepped back from the brink
found some peace inside yourself
laid down your heavy load

it’s so good to learn that from right here the view goes on forever
and you’ll never want for comfort
and you’ll never be alone
see the sunset turning red
let all be quiet in your head
and look about
all the stars are coming out
they shine like steel swords
wish me well where i go
but when you see me, you’ll know

MOUNTAIN GOATS SPRING/SUMMER TOUR
*with Bright Eyes

May
22 – Whelans, Dublin, Ireland
24 – Coalition, Brighton, England
25 – KOKO, London, England
27 – Academy 3, Manchester, England
28 – Brudenell Social Club, Leeds, England
29 – King Tuts (SOLD OUT) , Glasgow, Scotland
30 – Cluny, Newcastle, England

August
3 – Meijer Gardens , Grand Rapids, MI*
4 – Egyptian Room, Indianapolis, IN*
5/6/7 – Lollapalooza, Chicago, IL

[my photo, from high above the earth, heading west]

Pearl Street Music Festival is this weekend! Win Dr Dog tickets

This weekend the inaugural Pearl Street Music Festival embarks on its maiden voyage of awesomeness, taking over its namesake thoroughfare with terrific music and art.

Friday night I am seeing The Lumineers, Ian Cooke, Gregory Alan Isakov, Mason Jennings, and a night-closing set on the marvelous low stage of the Boulder Theater by The Head and The Heart. I couldn’t pick a better lineup if I tried. And on Saturday night –for those of you not coming to my house show and if the psychedelic jangle-pop is more your thing– you get Boulder Acoustic Society, the lovely ladies of Paper Bird, and headliners Dr. Dog!

Dr. Dog’s Shame, Shame, Shame album is one of my belated favorites of last year, and I just honorarily added this track into my Springtime Mix a few days ago when I was out on a run and it came on so flawlessly in the sun and budding trees. I think it fits best as track #16, after the Cuyahoga cover:

Shadow People – Dr. Dog

WIN A PAIR OF SATURDAY PASSES to see Dr. Dog (and all the other bands/venues) at the Pearl Street Music Festival, by emailing me and expressing your desire. I will pick someone by Thursday! Update: tickets have been given away!

The festival is also cool in the uniquely integrated way it takes advantage of the location right there in the heart of Pearl Street, with all its quirky shops, drum circles, culinary delights, and street musician hippies – bless their souls. With your festival pass, you get discounts on a bunch of rad local shops and restaurants, including things like a free cookie from Boulder Baked, a free glass of wine at Absinthe House, or a free yoga or JiuJitsu class, for those feeling adventurous and not-hungover on Saturday. Hi-YAH!

Tickets are still available for both Friday and Saturday, so check out the schedule, and I will see you Friday night.

Joe Pug is coming to my house this weekend

…and he is going to play us some music on Saturday night, and I really think you should come. If you have been reading Fuel/Friends for a while, y’all know that I think Joe Pug is one of the most piercingly insightful songwriters making music right now, and this will be an amazing night that hopefully leaves your jaw somewhere on my floor.

Now, you can’t tell from this picture (taken as “a Fuel/Friends exclusive” the other night — to which I texted back “it looks like a still from a ’70s porn”), but together with his touring mate Strand of Oaks, Joe is prepared to knock our collective socks off this Saturday, May 7th. Do RSVP here. I recommend bringing mint juleps.

So great is the obvious mutual musical affinity between these artists that they have each chosen one song of the other’s to cover. “Hymn #101” would rank up there as one of my most un-coverable songs ever, but I really admire the way Tim/Strand of Oaks is able to harness it and make it his tentative, haunting own.

End In Flames (Strand of Oaks cover) – Joe Pug

Hymn #101 (Joe Pug cover) – Strand of Oaks

The poster here is specially designed by Jupiter Visual for us, and we are super pleased to be working with them again. They’ll be on sale at the house show in very limited quantities, on I think a nice dark blue paper with silvery ink.

Joe’s also given me one of my favorite quotes, ever, in an interview we did one warm night back in 2009. He said:

“I think what a lot of people don’t necessarily realize… I mean, there’s no question that as you get older you get wiser. I’m not wiser than anybody else. But I think with youth there’s a certain greater willingness to say these things I say in my songs, whereas when you get older, you’ve experienced so much and you’ve seen so many contradictions in your life that you rightfully are hesitant to say anything out loud because you’ve seen everything proved wrong, at least once, you know what I mean?

In youth, you can make broader declarations, but also at the same time – there was one artist who said, ‘The entire job of the artist is to not get beat down by the meanness of the world.’

And I’m not talking about hope, or hopefulness. Art can be about that, but doesn’t necessarily have to be about that. It does have to do with believing things, though, whatever those things are. Whether they are the bleakest thoughts on the face of the earth or the most hopeful, you have to believe in them. And even if it’s temporary – even if you just believe them for those five minutes when you wrote the song, or if you’ve believed it since you were three years old until you pass on. So maybe it’s easier to believe in things when you’re younger.”

Anyone who says stuff like that in his off-time, just sitting in a park, is going to make some damn good music. Come check it out.

Finally, this never gets old:

If you can’t come to my house show, please check him out at one of these other stops; you are in for a treat.

JOE PUG SPRING TOUR

May 3 St. Louis, MO–Off Broadway
May 4 Lawrence, KS–The Bottleneck
May 6 Denver, CO–Hi Dive
May 7 Colorado Springs, CO–Fuel/Friends House Show
May 8 Salt Lake City, UT–Kilby Court
May 10 Pullman, WA–BellTower
May 11 Bellingham, WA–The Green Frog
May 12 Vancouver, CAN–The Media Club
May 13 Seattle, WA–Tractor Tavern
May 14 Portland, OR–The Doug Fir
May 15 Willamina, OR–Wildwood Hotel
May 17 San Francisco, CA–Bottom of the Hill
May 18 Santa Cruz, CA–The Crepe Place
May 19 San Diego, CA–The Casbah
May 20 Los Angeles, CA–The Satellite (formerly Spaceland)
May 21 Tempe, AZ–The Sail Inn
May 22 Albuquerque, NM–Low Spirits
May 24 Oklahoma City, NM–The Blue Door

set me free but leave the key

Last night I was sprawled in the back booth at Denver’s Sputnik Bar, one of my favorite places in all the land, discussing life over Samurai beers and the soundtrack of great old singles from the ’50s and ’60s that was playing over the speakers. The DJ spun fantastic tracks like Percy Sledge, The Beach Boys, and The Righteous Brothers for hours, reminding all of us what greatness can lie complete in a three-minute pop song, and how well they hold up 50 years later.

On the too-early sunrise drive home this morning, as the sun cracked across the Colorado plains, I landed (and stayed) on this new track from Portland’s Blitzen Trapper, part of Sub Pop’s limited edition Record Store Day compilation release, Please To Enjoy: Terminal Sales Vol. 4. This is simply a terrific pop song, clocking in at not even two minutes, and hearkening back to a few of my other favorite bands to sing along to: um, the Partridge Family and The Monkees. Sorry guys, but really.

So satisfying; I had it on repeat for the last half hour of my drive. That’s like 15 times in a row.

Maybe Baby – Blitzen Trapper

This song was also released on 7″ for Record Store Day. The packaging of the Sub Pop CD compilation (and presumably the vinyl) is neato — a series of square cards, one for each artist with original artwork on the front and information about the song/band on the back. It reminds of the shiny pack of Opening Day baseball cards I bought recently, largely because Tim Lincecum was on the front (but not inside). Collector’s edition!

fewer moving parts means fewer broken pieces

Last month David Bazan stopped in at my house on a quiet weeknight, during his tour of shows in people’s living rooms and gathering spaces. The former frontman for Pedro The Lion showed up sniffly in a red hooded sweatshirt, carrying his guitar case to my front step. I offered him some Gypsy Cold Care tea and we sat to chat as the (largely 20-something male) crowd began to make their way up the walk, assorted microbrews in hand.

After the very first house show I ever attended, I wrote that: “I was startled by the intimacy, as I think many of us were. I am used to (and prefer) my shows small and earnest, but often the artificial barrier between performer and audience is hedged cleanly by the drop-off of the stage to the sticky floors below. As eager as I was, it felt almost too intimate at times, especially given the songs he performs – sharper at excising things from my heart than any scalpel. It would be akin to kissing a stranger at a loud, smoky nightclub or kissing them on a quiet Sunday morning at the sun-drenched kitchen table. In such close quarters, there is nowhere to hide.”

I still feel this way about house shows, and now even moreso after seeing David Bazan lay bare everyone and everything in that room with just his voice and guitar. As I sat there listening to his songs that he often performed with his eyes clenched shut, there was a keeling unsteadiness within me, so acutely he probed. I was absorbed into his fierce and sometimes sardonic, regretful humor, his unflinching engagement with all the super-hard questions that crouch in corners.

I was wearing a hoodie and sitting directly to his right, facing much of the crowd. I kept finding myself ferociously wanting privacy, wanting to pull my hood up and disappear inside of it as I listened. I felt like all my stories were being written in black ink in public, scrawled across my face as I listened to him. He has a way of making the listener feel suddenly small, suddenly mortal. A speck hurtling along. A cascade of failings and hopes, trying to make sense of it all, thinking about the promises we keep.

Bazan would stop every two or three songs and very humbly ask the audience, “So… is there anything you guys would like to talk about at this point in the show?” At first the questions trickled back to him, but as we all grew to understand this hybrid concert/communal interview concept, they began to torrent. Someone asked him, in writing songs, how much is about him and how much is someone else? He replied, “Fiction can often represent your truest self better than non-fiction, because you’re not bound by reality.” With Pedro the Lion songs, he said 90% of them were fictional, as compared to his last album, the deeply personal Curse Your Branches, where 90% are autobiographical.

When asked about his process for writing songs, Bazan said that he’s found that “one line of a song has to emerge fully formed, and in the DNA of that lyric, the rest of the song lies encoded, if you dig for it.” We chatted about both the Black Album (“I have been listening to ’99 Problems’ on repeat in the van, that is just an amazing, amazing song”) and The White Album, in relation to what we pay for music (“If it cost $1000, I’d find a way to save up my money and buy it”). Bazan is extremely intelligent, and said things I liked immensely, such as “buying records is a good way for a culture to stay healthy.” It was fascinating hearing what all the fans in the audience wanted to ask him. There was no boundary –none– between musician and listener, and that felt quietly revolutionary.

Another thing you need to know is that Bazan has crazy-committed fans. A kid that looked all of seventeen had driven from Wyoming with his girlfriend to sit there in what can best be described as rapt reverence. I found myself watching the audience as much as I watched Bazan — watching them whisper along every lyric, watching the tough-looking Hispanic guy start to cry as he pumped his fist along to the words “The poison makes its way through my body slowly, into the pleasure centers of my brain / If you were here, I would admit that I’m an asshole, but now it’s over and I can’t stay sober — though it isn’t like I try…” When I encounter fans like these (reference: Wilco), I know I need to pay close attention, and that I will be rewarded like I was that night with Bazan. I think we all left completely sated, but with so much on our minds. I had trouble sleeping after.

Dave’s new album Strange Negotiations is out on May 24th on Barsuk Records. He played the record over the house stereo after his set ended, much to the delight of the audience that lingered over beers, then packed the CD up with him when he left the next morning (but not before he and I had one of the nicest morning coffee hours at my kitchen table that I’ve ever had – endlessly fascinating, that man).

Below is the first track released from the new album, along with a few particularly incisive older ones.

Wolves At The Door – David Bazan
(from the new album)

Bless This Mess – David Bazan
(from 2009′s Curse Your Branches)

Fewer Broken Pieces – David Bazan
(from 2007′s Fewer Moving Parts EP)

Go to:
DAVID BAZAN’S SPRING TOUR
* w/ Cotton Jones
# w/ S. Carey
& w/ Rocky Votolato

May
04 – PORTLAND, OR – Crystal Ballroom

June
01 – SALT KAKE CITY, UT – Kilby Court *
02 – DENVER, CO – Hi-Dive *
03 – KANSAS CITY, MO – Record Bar *
04 – COUNCIL BLUFFS, IA – West Fair Amphitheatre (w/ Bright Eyes, Jenny and Johnny)
06 – ST. PAUL, MN – Turf Club *
07 – Madison, WI – Annex
08 – CHICAGO, IL – Lincoln Hall *
10 – ST. LOUIS, MO – Old Rock House *
11 – COLUMBUS, OH – Basement *
12 – AKRON, OH – Musica
13 – PONTIAC, MI – Pike Room
14 – TORONTO, CANADA – Lee’s Palace
15 – OTTAWA, CANADA – Mavericks
17 – ITHACA, NY – Haunt
18 – HAMDEN, CT – Space w/ Via Audio
19 – CAMBRIDGE, MA – T. T. The Bear’s #
22 – NEW YORK, NY – Bowery Ballroom #
23 – PHILADELPHIA, PA – Johnny Brenda’s #
24 – WASHINGTON, DC – Black Cat #
25 – CHAPEL HILL, NC – Local 506 (w/ Centro-matic, Sarah Jaffee)
27 – ORLANDO, FL – Social #
28 – ATLANTA, GA – Earl #
29 – BIRMINGHAM, AL – Bottle Tree #
30 – NEW ORLEANS, LA – One Eyed Jacks #

July
01 – BATON ROUGE, LA – Spanish Moon #
02 – HOUSTON, TX – Fitzgerald’s &
03 – DENTON, TX – Dan’s Silverleaf &
05 – AUSTIN, TX – ACL Presents: Satellite Sets
07 – TEMPE, AZ – Sail Inn &
08 – SAN DIEGO, CA – Casbah &
09 – LONG BEACH, CA – Alex’s Bar &
10 – LOS ANGELES, CA – Troubadour &
12 – VISALIA, CA – Cellar Door &
13 – SAN FRANCISCO, CA – Independent &
16 – SEATTLE, WA – Showbox at the Market &