Valley Maker live in the 9th Ward with Tenci, Tough Old Bird

Valley Maker live in the 9th Ward with Tenci, Tough Old Bird

Monday, August 23

DSP Shows presents Valley Maker live in the 9th Ward at Babeville with Tenci and Tough Old Bird

7pm Doors, 7:30pm Show

Tickets (on sale June 16 10am) : General Admission standing tickets $13.00 advance, $15.00 day of show on Eventbrite.com, or the Babeville Box Office (M-F 11a-5p)

By artist request, the following restrictions are in place:

All attendees will either be fully vaccinated or will have received a negative PCR test within 48 hours preceding the show. We will accept NY State Excelsior Pass, Vaccination Card or a clear photo of your vaccination card on your phone will be accepted at the door. If unvaccinated please bring printed or digital proof of your recent negative PCR test.

Masks (mouth and nose coverings) will be worn by all attendees at all times except when drinking.

If you have any questions or concerns please reach out to the box office at info@babevilleBuffalo.com or 716-852-3835.

 

VALLEY MAKER

We have all become experts in the imbalance of uncertainty these days, newly accustomed to canceling plans and tentatively rescheduling them for some future we can only imagine. For Austin Crane—the ruminative songwriter, riveting guitarist, and singular voice performing and collaborating as Valley Maker—such a sense of uncertainty has emerged as his steadfast companion these last few years, a period of profound transition. This flux is the anchor for Crane’s fourth and best album as Valley Maker, the gorgeous and felicitous When the Day Leaves.

Early in 2019, Crane and his wife, Megan, decided it was time to leave Seattle. South Carolina natives, they’d been in Seattle for nearly a decade while he pursued a doctorate in human geography at the University of Washington, and she worked as a midwife. As Summer 2019 ended, they prepared to head east to Columbia, SC, rejoining a deep community of friends and moving into a century-old home in need of big love. Still, major questions loomed: Would they, just then past 30, like it enough to stay, to start a new life? And what did it mean to go home?

Driven as it is by departure, When the Day Leaves marks the arrival of Valley Maker as a trustworthy narrator for these shaky times. Crane synthesizes these complex feelings into the magnetic first single, “No One Is Missing.” A song about reckoning with self-doubt while searching for community, “No One Is Missing” acknowledges the tension inherent in those ideas, especially during our polarized era. The swaying “Branch I Bend” is a workaday anthem and an ode to whatever goodness you find, to recognizing grace in a world that can seem starved for it.

All these thoughts are rendered with newfound lyrical richness, balancing intimate tidbits with universal ambiguity. Crane raises questions only to let them linger, shaping clouds of geographical and political specifics and asking you to draw out the meaning. During “Mockingbird,” he sings of moving to his Columbia home and planting a new tree, tiny details that induce an imaginative diorama for the listener—where does life go from here?

In the months before recording began, Austin convened with producer Trevor Spencer and longtime harmonizing partner Amy Godwin for sessions in Portland and Seattle, teasing out the album’s interwoven arrangements and meticulous vocal harmonies. Then, in November 2019, Crane decamped from Columbia to the Pacific Northwest for a three-week session in the woods outside of Woodinville, a small town northeast of Seattle at the foot of the Cascades. He stayed in the loft of Spencer’s Way Out Studio, the collaborators sealing themselves off in a horse barn-turned-recording space like kids at summer camp, just as winter’s mist closed in.

The time commitment is a crucial component of When the Day Leaves. For 46 minutes, you feel like you’re sitting with Crane in an intricate, unified sound-world of his design. He offloads his observations about our tangled thicket of hope and fear, aspiration and exasperation.

When the Day Leaves is an uninterrupted sequence of reflections about the generational limbo of being awed by and worried for this world. The anxiety of uncertainty—always part of life but now seemingly omnipresent—can be vexing, a reality these songs acknowledge. Crane, as he sings at one point, is fully “aligned with my blues.” But these songs also affirm that life is an endless opportunity for renewal, for trying again. As with dusk, when the day leaves and “tries to start again” amid a riot of expiring colors, we eventually learn what comes next.

Tenci – Chicago Singer Songwriter – My Heart is an Open Field is available now: https://tenci.bandcamp.com/

Tough Old Bird – “folk music” from Buffalo, NY – The Old Great Lakes is available now https://tougholdbird.bandcamp.com/


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Date/Time
Date(s) - 08/23/2021
7:30 pm

Address
341 Delaware Avenue
Buffalo
New York
14202
United States