Saturday, September 17th at The Basile Theatre at The Athenaeum
Doors 7PM / Show 8PM / All ages show
Reserved Seating Only
Advance: $35 / Day of Show: $40
Portland, OR-based singer, songwriter, and producer John Craigie adapts moments of solitude into stories perfectly suited for old Americana fiction anthologies. Instead of leaving them on dog-eared pages, he projects them widescreen in flashes of simmering soul and folk eloquence. On his 2022 full-length album, Mermaid Salt, we witness revenge unfurled in flames, watch a landlocked mermaid’s escape, and fall asleep under a meteor shower.
The album comes from the solitude and loneliness of lockdown in the Northwest. Someone whose life was touring, traveling, and having lots of human interaction is faced with an undefinable amount of time without those things. So, he began writing new songs and envisioning an album that was different from his past records. The sound of everyone playing live in a room together was traded for the sound of song construction with an unknown amount of instruments and musicians—a quiet symphony.
“I got time to silence all the noise and chaos of touring and look inward,” he observes.
In the end, Craigie offers a sense of peace on Mermaid Salt.
About Maya de Vitry:
Maya de Vitry’s devotion to songwriting is her way of staying present, curious, and imaginative. Pennsylvania-raised and Tennessee-based, Maya first traveled and performed as a fiddling street musician, and then in bars, theaters, and on festival stages as a founding member of The Stray Birds. In 2019, she released her critically-acclaimed solo debut Adaptations (produced by Dan Knobler) and has quietly emerged as a prolific songwriter and musical collaborator. Violet Light marks her 3rd solo release, and is a reference to “ultraviolet” light—a frequency which, while visible to creatures like butterflies and bees, lies beyond any human sense. It’s a reminder of a simple human limitation and an inspiring concept for an artist who feels most at home in the woods or the garden, observing the non-human living world and then emerging with vibrant and vital songs on the human condition—songs that, as No Depression says, “open windows that give us insights into the ambiguities of our lives”. At once reflective and urgent, and as intimate as it is expansive, Violet Light is an open-hearted invitation to explore the tensions between the visible and the imagined, between love and control, and our unrelenting human desire to belong—to a home, to an environment, and to each other.
