Josh Rouse, Kevin Gordon
Doors 7PM / Show 8PM
$25ADV / $30DOS
Seated show
“Like a baseball player who quietly hits 30 home runs every year or a golfer who regularly finishes in the Top Ten, Josh Rouse's continued streak of excellence is easy to ignore and maybe even downplay a little” -- Tim Sendra, Allmusic.com
You don’t have to work hard to enjoy Rouse’s music. His songs present themselves to you with an open heart, an innate intelligence and an absolute lack of pretension. They are clear-eyed, empathetic and penetrating. Without pandering, they seek to satisfy both your ear and your understanding. The verses draw you in with telling detail, both musical and thematic, and the choruses lift and deliver. They resolve without seeming overly tidy or pat.
Josh Rouse was born in Nebraska, and following an itinerant upbringing he eventually landed in Nashville where he recorded his debut Dressed Like Nebraska (1998). The album’s acclaim led to tours with Aimee Mann, Mark Etzel and the late Vic Chestnut. The followup- Home (2000)—yielded the song “Directions” which Cameron Crowe used in his film Vanilla Sky.
“Every time I’ve made a record, I’ve tried to make it different from the last one,” says Rouse. “I always became fascinated by a different style of music. But at the end of the day, no matter how eclectic I try to make it, it’s my voice and melodic sensibility that tie things together.”
For his breakthrough album, 1972 (2003), which happens to be the year he was born, Rouse decided to cheer up a bit. Noting that he’d earned a reputation for melancholy, he says, with a laugh, “I figured this is my career, I might as well try to enjoy it.” While the Seventies are often identified with singer-songwriters, Rouse was primarily attracted to the warmer sound of albums back then, as well as the more communal feel of the soul music of that time. The follow up, Nashville (2005) continued the hot streak and expanded his audience further.
After relocating to Valencia, Spain with his wife Paz, Rouse has released a steady stream of high quality songs and albums. Subtitulo (2006) contained the international indie folk hit "Quiet Town". On El Turista (2010) he even experimented with writing and singing some songs in Spanish. In 2014, he won a Goya Award (the Spanish equivalent of an Oscar) for best song for "Do You Really Want To Be In Love," from the film 'La Gran Familia Española.'
His latest release Going Places came together over the last two years when Josh Rouse found himself unable to tour and hunkered down with his family in Spain. Together with his Spanish band, he began workshopping new songs in a small local venue owned by a friend, resulting in ten road-ready tracks with a looser, more relaxed vibe.
Kevin Gordon’s Louisiana is a strange place. It’s a place where restless teens road trip
to where the highway dead-ends at the Gulf of Mexico; a place where prisoners who are
in for life compete in a rodeo while the town watches; where a character can get lost in
the humid afternoon and where religion may not signify hope; and where rivers, never
far away, carry secrets behind levees. “One of the things I like about it and am mystified
by is that what passes for normal in Louisiana would not make the grade elsewhere,” he
says.
The kicker? All of these postcards are based on true stories. It’s a place that he’s been
exploring for twenty years now, on the eve of the release of his astonishing new album
“Tilt And Shine” on Crowville Media. It is work that has earned him fans like noted author
and Elvis Presley biographer Peter Guralnick; New West Records artist Buddy Miller;
journalist, songwriter, and Country Music Hall of Fame staffer Peter Cooper; Todd
Snider; head of the Americana Music Association Jed Hilly; and Lucinda Williams, with
whom Kevin dueted on the song “Down To The Well” (which was featured prominently on
an Oxford American compilation).
Before you even hear his vivid lyrics, you start feeling the sound of that ’56 Gibson ES-
125 tuned down to open D, often with the tremolo flowing like a river, and an
unstoppable groove distilled from swamp blues and Sun Records. His MFA from the
University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop allows him to capture it with a degree of precision. As the New
York Times put it in its headline of a feature on Kevin, “A Musician Or A Poet? Yes to
Both.”
Kevin sums it up, “There are so many stories in north Louisiana and it’s a place that
nobody pays attention to. For me, you can feel the arc of time passing there. I’m captivated by
the power of strong memories—those films that run continuously in your mind, if you let
‘em.” With “Tilt and Shine,” those movies translate into rock n’roll poetry.