Grammy winner and MacArthur Fellow

Location:
Fuller Hall
St. Johnsbury Academy
1000 Main St.
St. Johnsbury, VT

Tickets: $54, $44, $34, $24

Rhiannon Giddens is a 2017 MacArthur “genius” award and the co-founder of the GRAMMY award-winning string band Carolina Chocolate Drops, in which she also plays banjo and fiddle. She began gaining recognition as a solo artist when she stole the show at the T Bone Burnett– produced Another Day, Another Time concert at New York City’s Town Hall in 2013. Her elegant bearing, prodigious voice, and fierce spirit that brought the audience to its feet that night is also abundantly evident on Giddens’ critically acclaimed solo debut, the Grammy nominated album, Tomorrow Is My Turn, which masterfully blends American musical genres like gospel, jazz, blues, and country, showcasing her extraordinary emotional range and dazzling vocal prowess.

Giddens’ second solo album, Freedom Highway was released in February, 2017. It includes 9 original songs Giddens wrote or co-wrote along with a traditional song and two civil rights-era songs, “Birmingham Sunday,” and Staple Singers’ well-known “Freedom Highway,” from which the album takes its name.

Giddens’ recent televised performances include The Late Show, Austin City Limits, Later…with Jools Holland,and both CBS Saturday and Sunday Morning, among numerous other notable media appearances. She performed for President Obama and the First Lady on a White House Tribute to Gospel, along with Aretha Franklin and Emmylou Harris; the program was televised on PBS.

Giddens sings a duet with country superstar Eric Church on his powerful song, “Kill a Word,” which is currently top 15 on country radio; the two have performed the song on The Tonight Show and the CMA Awards, among other programs. Giddens received the BBC Radio 2 Folk Award for Singer of the Year and has won the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Bluegrass and Banjo in 2016.Giddens, who studied opera at Oberlin, makes her acting debut with a recurring role on the television drama Nashville, playing the role of Hanna Lee “Hallie” Jordan, a young social worker with “the voice of an angel.

The Rhiannon Giddens concert is being presented as part of a special tribute to Paul Bengtson

Friday, September 21, 7:00 pm

Location:
Fuller Hall
St. Johnsbury Academy
1000 Main St.
St. Johnsbury, VT

Tickets: $48, $38, $28, $15

Save 20% when you buy by August 22. Discount is automatically reflected when you choose your seats.

Seniors and Catamount Arts members save $3.00 when ordering in person with id at the box office.

Combining careers as a country songwriter, producer and artist, two-time Grammy winner Rodney Crowell rose to fame during the 1980s as an influential figure in Nashville’s new breed of country traditionalists, along with Emmylou Harris, in whose Hot Band he worked for three years, playing rhythm guitar and singing harmony and duet vocals.

Crowell has maintained a prolific output well into the 200’s, with his most recent Grammy coming in 2014. He has performed and collaborated with his former wife, Rosanne Cash and with musicians including Ry Cooder, Jim Keltner, Willie Nelson. and fellow songwriters like Guy Clark. Crowell’s songs have been performed by Bob Seger, Waylon Jennings, George Jones, Emmylou Harris, Johnny Cash, Keith Urban, Tim McGraw, Crystal Gayle, Alan Jackson, The Oak Ridge Boys, Jewel, Kris Kristofferson, Sheryl Crow, and others. Crowell was admitted to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2003.

As he moves into elder-statesman territory, Crowell continues to extend the path carved out by the top-tier songwriters who preceded him. "All are so important," he said. "Bob Dylan would of course be an archetype, as would Neil Young, Johnny Cash, John Lennon. Every time they release work I find something in it." He would add a name to the pantheon. "Kris Kristofferson belongs in there, too. He personifies all that intelligence and emotional vulnerability and magnetism.”

Fifty years after Crowell first started playing as a teen in Houston garage bands, he still believes in the power of songs, and the responsibility of singing them. "The interesting thing about that garage band back then is that we would go from ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ by the Beatles to ‘Honky Tonkin’’ by Hank Williams. In southeast Texas those songs fit side by side.

"Recently, I think—I hope—that my study of the blues is starting to show up in my music. Those artists, whether it’s Lightnin’ Hopkins or John Lee Hooker or the acoustic Delta players, connected to something fundamental. With that in mind, I’m trying to move forward but also get back there."

“His sharpest, strongest, funniest music in years—perhaps ever. A bounty of weathered emotion and hard-won wisdom” — Slant Magazine

With opening act Thao (of the Get Down Stay Down)

Thursday, September 27, 7:00 pm
(Doors open at 6:00 pm)

Tickets on-sale via Spotify on April 18th
General on-sale on April 20th

Location:
Fuller Hall
St. Johnsbury Academy
1000 Main St.
St. Johnsbury, VT

Tickets: $20, $32, $44, $62 (plus $1 per ticket fee for Peer Solutions*)

Save 20% when you buy by August 28. Discount is automatically reflected when you choose your seats.

Seniors and Catamount Arts members save $3.00 when ordering in person with id at the box office.

*Neko Case has partnered with PLUS1 so that $1 from every ticket will go to Peer Solutions and support their positive youth leadership and development program designed to prevent harm before it begins and engage lifetime ambassadors of positive change (www.peersolutions.org).

KCP Presents is very pleased to present three-time Grammy Award nominee Neko Case in a special concert to showcase the singer/songwriter’s newest work.

Five years have passed since Case's last solo project, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You. In the interim, she sang on Whiteout Conditions, the 2017 release from longtime band mates the New Pornographers. The year before that, she released a vinyl box set of her solo work and joined country/pop singer/songwriter k.d. Lang and alternative/folk artist Laura Veirs on the case/lang/veirs project.

Recording that record was a revelation, from Veirs' innovative guitar tunings to Lang's skills in studio. "I learned so much experiencing the work ethic of those two," Case says. She considers Lang "probably the most natural producer I've ever seen. Watching her work was awe-inspiring."

After their national tour together, Case found similar transcendence in October 2016 sitting on a panel at the first-of-its-kind "Woman Producer" summit in Brooklyn, NY. Between discussions and performances from a diverse group of women who produce music from around the world, she wondered how it had taken such a long time to get to that moment, and why so many female pioneers had been forgotten.

"The George Martins and Quincy Joneses of the recording pantheon deserve every drop of praise and every project they have received," Case says. "But we can't keep telling the same stories over and over. We need more stories, more inspiration, more flavors."

She set to work on her next record looking for not just new stories but also new sounds. This time, she wanted to put herself in a setting far away from everything she knew. So she teamed up with Swedish producer Björn Yttling and went to Sweden to record during the fall of 2017. Case had already written songs with longtime collaborator Paul Rigby, laid down vocal and guitar tracks at WaveLab Studio in Tucson, and built Carnacial Singing, her recording space here in Vermont.

But in the middle of her stint in Stockholm, with the finish line in sight, she received a surreal 3am call telling her that her Northeast Kingdom house was burning and would likely be completely destroyed. She felt panicked and helpless.

The fire had started in the barn, where she kept an assortment of belongings, from artwork to old pianos. A friend had managed to get the dogs to safety. After the flames jumped to the house, her home was engulfed, too.

A few hours later, she went into a Stockholm studio and laid down the vocals for "Bad Luck," singing the lines she had written long before she realized they would land on her.

Case is now stoic about the fire. "If somebody burned your house down on purpose, you'd feel so violated. But when nature burns your house down, you can't take it personally." The month before the blaze, Hurricane Harvey had slammed into Texas and flooded Houston. Her home burned just as Puerto Rico was plunged into a nightmare by Hurricane Maria and wildfires incinerated California. "In the big picture, my house burning was so unimportant," she says. "So many people lost so much more: lives and lives and lives."

Case’s new record, Hell-On, came out of all of this reckoning with lost stories. It delivers both familiar Neko Case and something different. Death, extinction, exploitation, tides, animals, and adoration all blend recognizably. Case's trademark narrative gaps, just large enough for listeners to enter each song, likewise remain. As with Fox Confessor Brings the Flood and Middle Cyclone, Hell-On spins away from conventions of story, slipping into real life, with its fierce mess and blind catastrophes.

"I'm writing fairy tales, and I hear my life story in them, but they're not about me," Case says. "I still can't figure out how to describe it. But I think that's why we make music or write things. You've got to invent a new language."

And as for those fairy tales she's writing and the history she's remembering: "We need them now more than ever. We need stories from all sectors. Stories without endings. Stories with multiple endings. Stories that don't end happily, cautionary tales, everything. We don't need Disneyfied stories anymore."

A force of nature, an act of a mercurial, forgotten god, Hell-On is a record sealed by fire, filled with love and rage and dangers that might lay waste to everything at any moment. So if you wake up dazed in a smoking landscape, walking through the detritus of your own lost civilization with the smell of ash in your hair, your favorite sweater gone and a new song in your head, don't say you weren't warned.

About Thao:

Thao & The Get Down Stay Down-the San Francisco-based band fronted by singer and songwriter Thao Nguyen-releases their fourth album, A Man Alive, on March 4, 2016. Following the critical success of We The Common (2013), which was largely inspired by Thao's volunteer work with the California Coalition for Women's Prisoners, A Man Alive is an evolution in both subject matter and sound. Thao says: "I wanted A Man Alive to be beat- and bass-driven-rather than guitar-based-extending and elaborating upon the hip-hop influences of the previous record. A Man Alive is more instrumental, more riff- and loop-centric, and has more manipulated sounds." The Get Down Stay Down are at their best on this record, and Thao herself experimented with programming drumbeats for several tracks, although live drums are also played on every song.

Mostly recorded at Tiny Telephone Studios in San Francisco, A Man Alive was produced by Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards. Collaborating with Garbus, who is a close personal friend, allowed Thao to achieve the sound she had been striving for on previous releases. "Looking back," she says, "I was less sure of what I wanted. With this record I had clearer vision and aspirations. I wanted emotion. I wanted power. I wanted beats. Merrill's priority was that I take songs and ideas and run with them; she pushed us all over the place. She carved out time and space for us to experiment at will and fostered a very supportive, creative environment. Everyone was compelled to go beyond what they were comfortable doing. Musician-wise we kept it tight knit because the songs were so personal and vulnerable, and it was such an intense process, I only wanted those who know me well."

A Man Alive finds Thao exploring darker and more personal territory than in her earlier songwriting. She grew up in Northern Virginia, on the outskirts of Washington, DC. When Thao was young, her father left the family. She helped out in her mother's laundromat as a teenager, sitting at the counter with a guitar, making change for customers, working on her first songs, and playing at open mics in the evenings. Her father drifted in and out of their lives.

"The record is essentially about my relationship with my dad, its trajectory. It's a document of my life in conjunction with his, even though we've always been leading our lives away from each other. Some are optimistic and forgiving, some are the opposite. There are songs from his perspective: I imagined what it would be like to have kids and choose to exist without them, or feel like you have to save them from yourself. I realized there was this relationship that I never really talk about, realized it's defined so much of me. So it was a point of reckoning. The record wrote itself. Painstakingly, of course."

The emotional center of A Man Alive is the gorgeous, plaintive "Millionaire," a song about a wayward father. While the song could have ended up as a folk ballad, its instrumentation and atmosphere is of a piece with the rest of the album, pushed along by heavily reverbed synthesizer, a simple guitar riff, and subdued drums and bass. "That's a sad fucking song," Thao said. "I remember walking out of the vocal booth, and I saw Merrill tearing up. It's uncompromisingly sad, which I don't traffic well in. It took a lot."

Much of A Man Alive is vibrant and danceable-including standout tracks such as "Astonished Man," "Slash/Burn," "Nobody Dies," and "Meticulous Bird"-and the juxtaposition of that exuberance with the dark themes explored in the lyrics is one of the album's great achievements. The songs are often punctuated by handclaps, sing-along choruses, and ass-shaking beats. While these songs come from a deeply personal origin, they have such an accessible quality that it is easy to imagine an engaged and participatory live audience. "I suspect that's always been my motive," Thao says, "but this is the most actualized that it's ever been. I wanted to make a record that was very introspective and personal, but it would also seek to communicate. And we would have fun performing it-not just fun, but I wanted a kind of crazy, rabid, animal energy. That's my favorite thing about performing-you can tap into this frenzy. We want people to dance and feel. And I want to do that every night, too."

A Man Alive is undoubtedly a new career highlight for Thao & The Get Down Stay Down. The album presents a fiercely original group sound that is rife with experimentation and playfulness. It demonstrates Thao's development as a songwriter. And it achieves that most elusive quality in music-to create an album of songs that are dark yet buoyant, tragic yet redemptive, personal yet inclusive.