Formed in the summer of 2015, Illiterate Light transcend expectations of typical rock music through their limitations as a duo. Jeff Gorman elevates his gritty guitar melodies and honest lyricism by stomping out thunderous synth bass with his feet as Jake Cochran layers lush vocal harmony and explodes with body convulsing energy around his minimalist standing drum kit. Gorman and Cochran’s incessant writing, commanding live performance, and constant touring promise a bright future as they finish their debut album with Vance Powell (Jack White, Kings of Leon, Chris Stapleton) and Adrian Olsen (Foxygen, Natalie Prass). “Better Than I Used To” is the first taste of what’s to come from Illiterate Light. Spanning the better part of a decade, the creative evolution between Gorman and Cochran is far from ordinary. The duo has run an organic farm in the Shenandoah Valley, toured the mid-Atlantic in bands by bicycle, and lived in small communities while pursuing modes of alternative education. Their eclectic background is mirrored in their sound and lyricism, floating between postmodern confusion and vibrant optimism. Though shaped by the DIY music scene of their hometown Harrisonburg VA, the duo has grown immensely through immersion in the thriving communities of both Richmond, VA and Nashville, TN. Links: Website | Facebook | Instagram | SoundCloud | Spotify | YouTube

Sidney Gish is a singer-songwriter and full-time student with a wry sense of humor in Boston, Mass. where she’s been recording and releasing her own work since 2015. She dropped her first album, Ed Buys Houses, in December 2016 and No Dogs Allowed this year. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Bandcamp | YouTube

Capping off a fruitful 12-year long solo career, David Bazan resurrects both the moniker and mindset of his profoundly influential indie rock outfit, Pedro The Lion. The band’s new album and Polyvinyl debut, Phoenix, marks a return to form as the follow up to their 2004 opus, Achilles Heel. Phoenix maps out the emotional intricacies of growing up in Arizona with the songs themselves a darkly hopeful introspection into home and what it means to go back, if you ever can. Since their formation in 2001, mewithoutYou have become a standard-bearer for their genre. Across six full-length albums and a handful of EPs, the Philadelphia band— alternately labeled experimental punk, post-hardcore, indie rock, etc.—have long put a premium on progression, never anchoring themselves to a single sound and instead gracefully wandering across stylistic lines. It’s that same spirit that informed the band’s upcoming seventh album , their second for Run For Cover Records, as well as its accompanying EP . Pedro The Lion links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Music mewithoutYou links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube

For a guy whose career has evolved more by serendipity than design, Ben Dickey’s professional journey has turned into one heckuva ride. It’s not every day an obscure musician’s famous actor/director friend hands him the lead in a passion-project indie film, and he not only winds up sharing the screen with one of his musical heroes, he also wins a Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize for Dramatic Achievement in Acting – and a Variety magazine “for your consideration” plug for a Best Actor Oscar nomination. 

Dickey’s acting debut in Blaze, Ethan Hawke’s biopic about doomed Texas singer-songwriter Blaze Foley, has already led to more roles, including their pairing as bounty hunters in The Kid, a western directed by Vincent D’Onofrio. But just as exciting, as far as Dickey’s concerned, is the opportunity it provided to record with that musical hero, longtime Bob Dylan guitarist Charlie Sexton (who played Blaze’s other troubled Texas songwriting legend, Townes Van Zandt). After they did the film’s original cast recording (on Light in the Attic Records), Sexton produced Dickey’s solo album, A Glimmer on the Outskirts. That inspired Sexton, Hawke and Blaze executive producer Louis Black to form SexHawkeBlack Records, a new Austin-based imprint under the umbrella of Nashville’s Dualtone Records. Dickey’s March 7, 2019 release is the label’s first. It’s hardly Dickey’s first recording foray, however. In fact, he says, he preferred the idea of forming a label to shopping for one because he’d been signed before – and still bears scars from watching the dream morph into a momentum-sucking nightmare. But SexHawkeBlack president Erika Pinktipps happens to be friends with Dualtone’s founder; that connection quickly turned into an actual alliance. “We’re all doing this together,” Dickey says, “ a group of people who all care about each other and have similar artistic arrows pointed in the same direction.” Dickey was 10 when his artistic arrow started pointing toward music; that’s when his grandfather handed down his 1935 Gibson L-30 archtop. “He was a magical fellow, and his guitar is, too,” Dickey says. “So I wanted to be magic, too.” 

Within a year, his grandfather was gone. The magic, fortunately, stayed. But conjuring it wasn’t always easy for a kid growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, far from his dad – a college football star who’d moved to Georgia after the parental split, when Dickey was 4. Ten years later, Dickey’s mother left, too – following her friend and boss, Bill Clinton, from the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion to the White House. Dickey moved into his grandmother’s basement – and became one more angry, disaffected teenage rocker. 

He formed his first “real” band, Shake Ray Turbine, at 16, made his first record at 17 and began touring at 18, ditching Little Rock Central High (most famous students: the Little Rock Nine) for an $850 Ford van. When the founder of their D.I.Y. label, File 13 Records, headed to Philadelphia for college, they followed. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify

Inara George and Greg Kurstin, alias the bird and the bee, are an army of two. They listen to everything, and answer to no one. Over the course of 3 years, they whiled away scattered afternoons in Greg’s studio in Echo Park, California, sequestered in a little world of their own making, and creating the ten sunshine-drenched, semi-psychedelic ditties you hold before you. Were these compositions intended for public consumption? Inara and Greg never gave it any thought; they made music together simply for the joy of it. the bird and the bee, their self-titled debut for Metro Blue Records, an imprint of Blue Note Records, is a labor of love. If you know anything about the backgrounds of Inara George and Greg Kurstin, the accomplishments of the bird and the bee might not seem quite so casual as all that. Both are blessed with extraordinary intuitive musical abilities, which have been bolstered by years of practice. Multi-instrumentalist Greg was a jazz piano prodigy by the time he started shaving; he moved to New York specifically to study with leftist Jaki Byard, a jazz icon best known as Mingus’ pianist. He returned to Los Angeles and became one of the city’s most well respected musicians, lending his skills to the likes of Beck and Robert Moog, as well as writing with and/or producing The Flaming Lips, Peaches, and Lily Allen, to name a few. As for Inara, she grew up in Los Angeles in a musical household, the daughter of Lowell George, frontman of the eclectic ’70s Southern rock band Little Feat. For several years she was in different bands in the Los Angeles area until she began her solo career releasing 2005’s critically acclaimed All Rise. During the making of that record was when Greg and Inara first met. It was through mutual friend and All Rise producer, Mike Andrews, that Inara and Greg made a connection. “I like to sing standards, and Greg likes to play them,” recalls Inara. “He was working on my record, and one day, after a rehearsal, we hung out near a piano and, for three or four hours, played all the old songs we knew.” When they ran short of material, it dawned on them to augment the repertoire with a few originals and put their own stamp on the traditions established by the greats who had gone before. Like the Tropicalia revolutionaries of ’60s Brazil, who both revered and reacted against the traditions of bossa nova, the bird and the bee wanted to put their own spin on classic pop conventions. Although they composed as a team, Inara was responsible for vocals, while Greg oversaw almost all instrumental parts. Neither party assumed a secondary role; in the creative process, it was purely give-and-take. “Melodies would dictate chord progressions, or sometimes vice-versa, depending on where the vocal part wanted to go,” recalls Inara. “The writing was almost improvised in nature.” This was a change from many of their other gigs, especially for Greg; there was no pressure to deliver a hit song, or capture a signature sound. With the bird and the bee, any idea was fair game. The first song the duo collaborated on, “Again & Again,” became a template for the material to come. Handclaps and tambourines, a bumblebee bass line, and Inara’s beguiling vocals blend together in a summery concoction. Each of the songs that follows similarly and slyly unveils its own unique charm. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube

4ortyThoux Links: SoundCloud Lil Bobby Links: SoundCloud Fend! Links: SoundCloud D1G Links: SoundCloud Clip Links: SoundCloud

You can buy tickets for the both nights for $40. Tickets for individual shows are also available – $25 for Friday and $25 for Saturday. All shows are all ages. And remember all proceeds will go to the Be Loud! Sophie Foundation. Tickets: Both Nights/Weekend Pass $40 | Friday Night $25 | Saturday Night $25 Ladies and gentlemen…it is time to BE LOUD again! Be Loud! ’19 is the weekend of August 23 and 24th at Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro, with all proceeds benefiting the Be Loud! Sophie Foundation. This is our 6th Anniversary show (yes, we said 6th!) and we’re pleased to announce that Chatham County Line is headlining Friday night with The Old Ceremony, The Tan & Sober Gentlemen and Alive at 27 rounding out a super fine bill. Saturday night features Preeesh! plays Joe Jackson (Ladd, Plymale, Sledge, Dennis doing songs from the first two Joe Jackson records…more on that below) with Greg Humphreys Electric Trio, PopUp Chorus and Pajama Day. A great weekend of music! More information over at the website for Be Loud! Friday headliner Chatham County Line has been crossing borders musically and literally since they formed in the Triangle in the early ’00s. Call them “newgrass”, “guerilla bluegrass” or whatever you like…they’ve been at the forefront of an insurgence of Carolina bluegrass and have taken their incredible music throughout the world. The Old Ceremony are another local treasure who also bend genres, make incredible records and put on a mighty fine show. The Tan & Sober Gentlemen produce an avalanche of Scotch-Irish hillbilly insanity they dub “Celtic punk-grass.” Alive at 27 rocked the stage at our annual spring high school showcase and just released their first EP this summer. Saturday night features Preeesh!, a supergroup comprised of John Plymale, Rob Ladd, Robert Sledge and Brian Dennis, who will be performing songs from Look Sharp! and I’m the Man, Joe Jackson’s first two records from 1979 (which was 40 years ago!). Be Loud regulars will recognize these four from previous festivals and the songs are equally memorable. Greg Humphreys has also played Be Loud before, fronting Dillon Fence and Hobex, and we’re thrilled to have his current band the Greg Humphreys Electric Trio come down from New York City to perform this year. Get ready for a little soul, a little funk and a lot of fun. If you’ve never seen or been involved in a PopUp Chorus show you are in for a treat. The whole audience learns, rehearses and sings a song in 40 minutes and (drumroll) we’ll be singing Tom Petty’s “American Girl”. Pajama Day’s indie pop was a big hit at our high school showcase. Thanks for your support and Be Loud!

Shark Quest Comprised of a virtual who’s-who of the local Triangle (NC) music scene of the late ’90s, Shark Quest draws on a myriad of styles, melding individual influences & talents to create something that is definitively their own. Dusty pop melds with elements of surf guitar, bluegrass, traditional folk, bossa nova, Sufi-western, & neoclassical baroque to create a sound that is uniquely Shark Quest. Links: Bandcamp The Shoaldiggers The Shoaldiggers’ nine pieces produce a one of a kind sound that is completely unique, yet familiar enough to embrace. From rolling seascapes to the hollers of the smokey mountains, Shoaldiggers shows are a swamp grass blast! Links: Website | Facebook | Spotify Mystery Ranch Links: Facebook

The final words sung on the sixth album by WHY? are an apt place to begin: “Hold on, what’s going on?” Because while there’s much familiar about the oddly named Moh Lhean-mastermind Yoni Wolf’s sour-sweet croon, his deadpan poet’s drawl and ear for stunningly fluid psych-pop-folk-whatever arrangement-a great deal has changed in the four years that’ve passed since 2012’s Mumps, Etc., an LP that honed the band’s orchestral precision and self-deprecating swagger to a fine point. It’s significant that this is the first fully home-recorded WHY? album since the project’s 2003 debut. Made mostly in Wolf’s studio and co-produced by his brother Josiah, the result is obsessive, of course, but also intimate, and flush with warmth and looseness. But the biggest transformation is a bit subtler. After years of eying his world, in part, with a cynical squint, Wolf here learns a new mode. While Moh Lhean never stoops to outright optimism, it chronicles our hero finding peace in the unknowing, trading the wry smirk for a holy shrug, and looking past corporeal pain for something more cosmic and, rest assured, equally weird. A low tone opens the album on “This Ole King” as acoustic pluck and upright bass form a Western bedrock beneath Wolf’s fragile voice. But as the song pushes on, the playing gets brighter and the vocal becomes a mantra-like hum inspired by Ali Farka Touré’s blues, before rolling into a second part rich with chiming keys and twisting harmony-Brian Wilson’s kaleidoscopic vision of pop. If there’s new litheness here, it’s probably because Wolf spent much of the time between albums collaborating-with ex/muse Anna Stewart as the fuzz-pop duo Divorcee, and MC Serengeti as the puckishly depressive Yoni & Geti. And if there’s a lithe newness, it may be that Wolf excised some nostalgia via his 2014 solo tapes-one re-recording choice raps from his own catalog, and another covering cuts by artists like Bob Dylan and Pavement. It’s no wonder, then, that “The Water” handily morphs a moody folk tune into some strange new form of full-band dub. Or that “One Mississippi” bounces along happily over a flurry of bizarre percussion, whistled melodies, and trippy synthesizer blips. Perhaps most impressive is “Consequence of Nonaction,” which vacillates between a quiet meditation for guitar/voice/clarinet, and wild, sax-strewn astral art-funk. Movement is a key theme of Moh Lhean. It’s a breakup album without a romantic interest-coded within the lyrics is a tale about fleeing the seductions of a wintry figure for something synonymous with spring. “Easy” plays like a ward against the old ghost who haunts “January February March,” while “George Washington” places our host in a tiny watercraft, “paddling for land/hand on heart and heart in hand” as that faceless malevolent force stays ashore. While writing these songs, Wolf suffered a severe health scare far from home. Rather than drive him to depression, his brush with mortality imparted an incongruous impression of peace and connection to the living. At the end of “Proactive Evolution,” wherein WHY? enlists mewithoutYou’s Aaron Weiss to celebrate the stubborn persistence of humankind, Wolf samples not only thinkers like Sharon Salzberg and Ram Dass, but his actual doctors-the voices that helped shape his new outlook. Sure, Wolf poses as many questions as ever. Moh Lhean’s gorgeously psychedelic closer, “The Barely Blur” with Son Lux, puzzles over the nature of existence. But rather than leave us with the macabre chill of death, as many a WHY? LP has, the song dissolves into the infinite-the sound of the Big Bang. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

This is a general admission seated show. Hot Tuna, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady, perform with a well-honed and solid power – always in the groove from their years of experience and mutual inspiration. Started as a side project during Jefferson Airplane days, the constant, the very definition of Hot Tuna, has always been Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady. The two boyhood pals have never wavered in one of the most enduring friendships in Rock history. From their days playing together as teenagers in the Washington, DC area, through years of inventive Psylodelic rock in San Francisco (1996 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductees), to their current acoustic and electric blues sound, no one has more consistently led American music for the last 50 years than Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady, the founders and continuing core members of Hot Tuna. At the 2016 Grammys, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady were honored with Lifetime Achievement Awards. “Jorma Kaukonen is a force in American music, equally adept at fingerpicked acoustic folk and blues as he is at wailing on an electric.” – Acoustic Guitar Guitarist and vocalist, Jorma Kaukonen is a highly respected interpreter of roots music, blues, Americana, and popular rock-and-roll. Jorma’s repertoire goes far beyond psychedelic rock; he is a music legend and one of the finest singer-songwriters in music. Jorma tours the world bringing his unique styling to old blues while writing new songs of weight and dimension. “Jack Casady is virtually unparalleled–and yet he has one of the most truly unique electric-bass voices in rock…he can melt into a supportive role but when opportunity knocks, he bursts forth with creative lines–both simple and ornate–that are unlike any you’ve heard” – Premier Guitar One of the most unique innovators in the sixty-year history of the bass guitar, Jack Casady made his sweeping melodic mark helping to create the “San Francisco Sound” with legendary rock group Jefferson Airplane. Jack went on to track with Jimi Hendrix, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Warren Zevon, members of the Grateful Dead, John Lee Hooker, and Gov’t Mule. Casady, regarded as one of rock’s greatest bassists, is certainly one of its most original. “Hot Tuna is a Psychedelic-Blues Institution” – Rolling Stone Magazine Electric Hot Tuna Website | Rob Ickes & Trey Hensley Website

Joe Newberry Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | SoundCloud Jess Klein Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | SoundCloud | YouTube Wyatt Easterling Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube