The Suitcase Junket with Ben de la Cour
Doors 7PM / Show 8PM
Seated Show
$15
The Suitcase Junket is multi instrumentalist Matthew Lorenz. Solitary on stage and on the road, his mind is crowded with characters, narratives, voices, imagery, sounds as wide and varied as mountain throat singers and roadhouse juke boxes, plus newsreels of the planet's destruction and salvage. With his 2020 release, The End is New, Lorenzs grand vision for the song overrides the how of it. The End is New is Lorenz's sixth full length album as The Suitcase Junket, his first for Renew Records/BMG.
The End is New was produced by trusted friend, producer Steve Berlin of Los Lobos, who produced The Suitcase Junket’s acclaimed 2018 release, Mean Dog Trampoline. “I told Steve I wanted to make a doom folk record,” says Lorenz. “That is what I had started calling my music when people asked. He was game. Neither of us knew quite what that meant at the time, but I think we found out with The End is New. There is a heavy mix of hope and desperation in the sound and lyrically I was trying to be a mirror to society using truth, myth, confessions and stories.”
“A master of musical imagination.”
“The overall sound lands somewhere between the Avett Brothers and early, dirty Black Keys. There is a Tom Waits vibe in the fuzzy megaphone reverb mic, and something ancient, near tribal, in his whistles and moans.”
With songs that explore life's murky corners and shadowy characters, Ben de la Cour's music occupies the intersection between gothic Americana and dark, gritty folk. It's a sound fueled by the stories and struggles of its creator, a lifelong searcher who's never been afraid to shine a light on his own demons.
Born in London and raised in Brooklyn, Ben experienced a coming of age when he left home at seventeen to become a farm worker, a janitor, a boxer in Havana, and in his own words one of the laziest and most inept bouncers and bartenders in history. After logging several years on the road with various metal bands Ben followed his muse to New Orleans before landing in Nashville in 2013 where he found a community of simpatico musicians and songwriters who weren't afraid to chase down their own musical horizons.
Albums like Ben's 2012 debut, Ghost Light and 2018's career shifting The High Cost of Living Strange chronicled not only that deep sense of restlessness but also his various attempts to wrestle his own vices into submission. The result is a haunting, harrowingly personal version of folk music that earned praise from outlets like American Songwriter and NPR. Ben was named a Kerrville New Folk Winner shortly after the 2016 release of Midnight in Havana and began maintaining a regular presence on the road, playing more than 100 shows a year. In a genre that has become increasingly polished and pop friendly throughout the 21st century, his stark tales of heartbreak, supernatural menace, God and the ever present specter of death seem to harken back to folk's roots, making him a modern torchbearer of a classic sound.