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Jenny Reynolds, Susan Gibson & Jess Klein

  • The 04 Center 2701 S Lamar Blvd Austin United States (map)

Doors @ 7pm
Full Bar
Free On-site Parking
All Ages

JENNY REYNOLDS:

Produced by Mark Hallman, Reynolds's current recording “Any Kind of Angel” was released in 2020, and features Jaimee Harris, BettySoo, Warren Hood, Oliver Steck, and Scrappy Jud Newcomb. She started a new record in June 2022. Since moving to Austin in 2003, New Englander Jenny Reynolds has played the Old Settlers Music Festival and the Kerrville Folk Festival, and worked with Grammy Nominee Ruthie Foster, and Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame inductee Ian McLagan. She was an Official Showcase Artist at SXSW 2008 and 2018, and was named “Best New Local Act” in the Austin Chronicle’s 2005 Critics Poll.


SUSAN GIBSON:

 

One of the reasons Susan Gibson always keeps a banjo close at hand, be it in the studio or at every show she plays, is because she likes the "lift" it brings to counterbalance a particularly heavy lyric: "Almost like it's got a smile attached to it," she says. But as much as she loves the instrument, the fact is, she really doesn't have to reach for it that often. Not because she shies away from such material, but because her naturally buoyant melodies and warmly reassuring, conversational singing and writing voice more often than not provide all the lift she needs to light up any song, room, or mood. For proof, just listen to The Hard Stuff — the award-winning Texas songwriter's seventh release as a solo artist and her first full-length album since 2011's Tight Rope. Much like the EP that preceded it, 2016's Remember Who You Are, the aptly-titled The Hard Stuff is rooted in grief; Gibson wrote the album in the midst of coming to terms with the death of first one parent and then the other in the span of four years, a time during which she says her career became far less of a priority to her than her family. But it was that very period of slowing down for emotional recalibration that ultimately pulled her out of the dark and back into the light. As she sings on The Hard Stuff's disarmingly playful title track, "Nothing lifts a heavy heart like some elbow grease and a funny bone" — and even when Gibson's not laughing at herself, her refreshingly clear-eyed perspectives on matters of life, love, work, and loss (sometimes all within the same song, as in the invigorating opener "Imaginary Lines" and the deeply moving "Wildflowers in the Weeds") illuminate the whole album with a spirit-charging current of resiliency. Of course, anyone familiar with Gibson's music knows that she's had that in her all along, from her salad days in the beloved Amarillo, Texas-based Amerciana band the Groobees back in the ’90s and from the get-go of her solo career with 2003's Chin Up. It was even all there at the very beginning, when she wrote a little song in college called "Wide Open Spaces" that grew up to become (with a little help from the Dixie Chicks) one of the biggest country songs of all time. Turns out all she had to do to rediscover it and get herself back on the road to embracing both life and art was to heed the best advice her father ever gave her, three little words that millions of Dixie Chicks fans (and a whole lotta Susan Gibson fans over the years, too) sing along to at every show: "Check the oil!" 


JESS KLEIN:

Over a career that spans two decades and has won her a devoted worldwide fan base, Jess Klein—who possesses what Mojo magazine calls “one of those voices you want to crawl up close to the speakers to listen to” has pursued a remarkable creative evolution that’s seen her dig ever deeper for resonant emotional insights, while continuing to refine her eloquently melodic, effortlessly accessible songcraft.  Jon Pareles of The New York Times calls her “a songwriter with a voice of unblinking tenacity…who finds parables in the everyday and also finds humanity behind the archetypal.”

The Rochester, NY native began writing songs as a college student in Kingston, Jamaica, and is known for staking out brave lyrical and musical territory with such albums as Wishes Well Disguised (1998), Draw Them Near (2000), Strawberry Lover (2005), City Garden (2006), Bound to Love (2009), Behind A Veil (2012) and Learning Faith (2014) which Folk Radio UK calls “Unquestionably the finest album of her impressive career.”  Jess spent eight years soaking up the live music culture of Austin, TX. Bootleg (2015) Jess’s live, full band album captures the dynamism of Jess onstage, backed by some of Austin’s top players.  Jess was named a 2015 Finalist in the highly regarded Kerrville New Folk Competition.  

In 2016, Jess and her husband, songwriter Mike June moved to tiny but vibrant Hillsborough, North Carolina where she recorded 2019's Back to My Green.  Americana UK raved, "When bluesy, gospel-infused fires can be found in the same broad church as soothing, maternal words to the wise, then here is a singer- songwriter who has found not only her place in her world, but also one for all those new arrivals on the scene to look up to."

Klein has performed to rapt audiences at the Newport Folk Festival, Winnipeg Folk Festival, Fuji Rock Festival in Japan and packed houses in notable listening rooms like Joe’s Pub, NYC, The Borderline in London, Club Passim in Boston and Fogartyville in Sarasota, FL. She has appeared on Good Morning America and NPR’s All Things Considered and toured across the US, Europe and Japan on her own and with such artists as Arlo Guthrie, John Fullbright and Carlene Carter.

Jess's new album is currently in production and due out shortly.