Five years since her debut album Delivery, Mikaela Davis has moved away from her hometown of Rochester, shared the stage with the likes of Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Christian McBride, Bon Iver, Lake Street Dive and Circles Around the Sun and entered a new decade. But it’s the ever-evolving relationships between her closest friends and bandmates that has propelled the Hudson Valley-based artist onto her latest album And Southern Star––a truly collaborative effort that ruminates on the choices we make, and the people we always come back to.

The band, made up of Davis (harp/vocals), Alex Coté (drums), Cian McCarthy (guitars/vocals), Shane McCarthy (bass/vocals) and Kurt Johnson (steel guitar), have been playing together for over a decade and it’s the first time they’ve appeared on a full length record together. Weaving 60s pop-soaked melodies, psychedelia and driving folk rock, And Southern Star picks apart the reflection we used to recognise, while trying to build a new one. It navigates the periphery of past selves, the coexistence of isolation and excitement in a new environment and the tension of growing away from what we thought we wanted, tackling it with a luscious, kaleidoscopic grace. “I finally feel like this album is more me than anything else that’s been released,” Davis says, adding that producing the album along with her four bandmates allowed them to carve out their own ideas, rather than someone else’s. It’s the band’s collective step into adulthood that has informed much of And Southern Star’s thematic landscape.

This is an all ages event

Songbyrd

Mikaela Davis 

Mikaela Davis - Pure Divine Love

Mikaela Davis

Raina Mullen

Gigs

Washington D.C.

Thursday, June 29th 2023  
Swim Camp + TBA  
9pm - $15 - All Ages

SWIM CAMP  
Philadelphia, PA  
https://swimcamp.bandcamp.com/

After releasing projects entitled Barlow Hill and Fishing in a Small Boat, Swim Camp’s Tom  
Morris accumulated a reputation for measured, introspective alternative country that drew on bedroom recording traditions and the bucolic soundscapes of his native Pennsylvania. Now, on the project’s forthcoming LP, Steel Country, Tom cranks up the distortion in a gentle nod to shoegaze that evokes senses of desolation and chaos that unfurl around him. Tom’s always been fascinated by visual signs of desolation, observing the abandoned century structures in his Philadelphia neighborhood and dreaming up stories of what they must have been. It’s through this narrative practice of archiving that Tom explores figures outside of himself after dedicating Swim Camp to autobiography and confession.

ACCESSIBILITY INFO: There are 13 stairs at the entrance to Quarry House Tavern

All Ages

Rediscover Fire

Swim Camp

Stupid Thing

Quarry House Tavern

Tuesday, July 18th 2023  
Fust + TBA  
8:30pm - $13 - All Ages

FUST  
Durham, NC  
https://fust.bandcamp.com/album/evil-joy

Fust is a songwriting project of Aaron Dowdy, carried out with friends Frank Meadows, Avery Sullivan, and John Wallace. It began as a home-recording attempt for Aaron in 2017, self-releasing seven four-song EPs on Bandcamp before it shifted to a live group. The four had played together in a combination of different bands for over a decade in Virginia and North Carolina. This permutation formed in 2018 in Brooklyn where they all lived at the time, meeting in Gowanus to play the lonesome, somewhat hopeless songs as quietly as possible—or as the group would call it, evilly, as it seems a violation to play gently songs of wrongdoing and despair. But Fust is also interested in these themes and moods as tropes, embracing the melodrama of country music, especially the idea that life isn’t adding up to much, or that one’s goodness isn’t being put to use. Fust—the word for the mildewy smell that lingers on unused things—is now based in Durham, North Carolina, and Evil Joy is both their record label debut and the group’s first recordings together.

ACCESSIBILITY INFO: There are 13 stairs at the entrance to Quarry House Tavern

All ages

Fust

The first album in over six years from American songwriter Julie Byrne is a testament to patience and determination, the willingness to transform through the desolation of loss, the vitality of renewal, and the courage to rise, forever changed. For nearly a decade, Byrne has moved through the world as a characteristically private artist largely outside the public eye. A self-taught musician that has committed her life to her work, she now emerges from a deeply trying and generative period with the most powerful, lustrous, and life-affirming music of her career, The Greater Wings. While they hold the plasticity of grief and trauma, the songs are universally resonant, unbridled in their devotion and joy, held up by the love and alliance of a chosen family. Byrne leans further into atmospheres both expansive and intimate; the lush, evocative songcraft flows between her signature fingerpicked guitar, synthesizer, and a newly adopted piano, made wider by flourishes of harp and strings. It is the transcendent sound of resource, of friendship that was never without romance, of loyalty that burns from within like a heart on fire, and the life force summoned in unrepeatable moments — raw, gorgeous, and wild.

This is an all ages event

Americana Shows in Washington D.C.

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