with Justin Townes Earle and Dawn Landes & the Hounds

Converse Presents "Gone To Governors" Live Music Series

Location: The Beach

Date: 8/8/2010

Notes:        

• All ages
• 6:00 pm Doors
  
• 8:15 pm Show
  
• The Beach opens at 10am
• Come early and enjoy the day
• FREE!
• Please note: Because this is a free show, there is a FIRST COME, FIRST SERVE policy in regard to capacity.
  

Josh Ritter & the Royal City Band

OFFICIAL WEBSITE          MYSPACE

So Runs The World Away, the new album from renowned singer-songwriter Josh Ritter, will be released May 4 on Pytheas Recordings. This is the fifth full-length recording from Ritter, who has been widely heralded by critics and fans alike. Of the Idaho-native, Paste magazine declares, "Put simply, Ritter is the most gifted interpreter of Americana, as an arranger and a lyricist, working today."

Recorded over 15 months at the Great North Sound Society in Maine, with additional recording at Brooklyn's Saltlands Studio, So Runs The World Away continues Ritter's longtime collaboration with producer and keyboard player Sam Kassirer. Additionally, the album features the return of Ritter's core line-up of touring bandmates: Zack Hickman, Austin Nevins and Liam Hurley.

Of the record, Ritter says, "I think of the songs on So Runs the World Away like pictures painted in oil on large canvasses. It's a record preoccupied with the extremes of scale, from infinitesimal particles to the nearly incomprehensible distances between the head of a pin and a nebula. Where the songs felt large to me, I wanted them to be huge, both musically and lyrically. I wanted them to feel like the steel hulls of massive ships sliding by deeply from below. Where they were small, I concentrated in on the smallest details that I could and we tried to make the music and the words work together. I love writing, and this was the most fulfilling record I've yet written."

Justin Townes Earle

MYSPACE

Sophomore releases tread such a bumpy road, with expectations being expectations and the fickle nature of hype and short attention spans. How can it live up to the excitement generated by a stellar debut? Within the first song on Justin Townes Earle's second album Midnight At the Movies, you just know you're hearing something special, that you are party to the unknown and exhilarating paths being explored by an artist on the creative ascendancy. Midnight At The Movies displays an adeptness and musical sophistication of remarkable, organic breadth and is as lyrically sharp as a lover's tongue as she is walking out the door.

If you didn't look at the songwriting credits, you'd swear the songs were part of our collective musical DNA, penned on the stoop of a one-pump filling station in dust bowl era Oklahoma, the smoke-filled song and dream factories of Tin Pan Alley, or at the back door of Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville. Justin effortlessly taps the romanticism imbued in the beaten-soled travelogues and mythos of Woody Guthrie; the lounging around a campfire at a work camp and the edgy angst of a wintry Minneapolis (yeah, just try to get that mandolin line from the cover of the 'Mats' "Can't Hardly Wait" out of your head.)

Midnight at the Movies is held firm by Justin's astonishing vision and conviction, yet roams o'er the vast landscape of American music without so much as a stumble. From the deft ear for orchestration and ambient arrangement reminiscent of Randy Newman right through, somehow, the countrypolitan cool of Lambchop and hipster retro vibes of Palace Brothers or Magnetic Fields (simply look to the title track for proof), to the amber smooth swing of the Ray Price smilin' thru the heartache school of country ("What I Mean To You," "Poor Fool"), to the immediacy and disarming simplicity of country blues ("They Killed John Henry"), to songs that tell a novel's worth of emotion in a few lines ("Mama's Eyes"), Justin Townes Earle pulls it all off with a confidence and candor that tells the listener that the daring exhibited on his debut album The Good Life only hinted at the growth to come.

Dawn Landes & the Hounds

OFFICIAL WEBSITE          MYSPACE

Bridging the worlds of indie rock, alt-country, and folk, singer/songwriter Dawn Landes has played with a similarly diverse range of artists, including Fred Eaglesmith, Amy Rigby, John Gorka, and Rainer Maria. A Louisville, KY, native, Landes moved to New York to attend N.Y.U. and play music; she obtained a weekly spot at the Jack Hardy song exchange and also plays frequent shows in New York as well as on the campuses of Yale, Sarah Lawrence, Barnard, Columbia, Brown, and, of course, her own school. In May 2001, Landes recorded her debut album, The Musician, with her band in Nashville, TN.
--by Heather Phares