The 04 Center is committed to providing the safest environment possible for its upcoming shows and we appreciate your patience as we work toward a return to normal. All our show staff are vaccinated and/or tested and will be wearing masks/face coverings. In addition, we support the artists who request the additional safety protocols.
Specifically at the request of the artist, the following health and safety requirements have been implemented for all attendees at this show: Kim Richey & Mando Saenz
In attending this event, you attest that you and all persons in your party:
- will provide a negative COVID-19 test result from a diagnostic test taken within 48 hours prior to attending the event;
OR
- fully vaccinated patrons may provide proof of vaccination by showing your vaccination card (at least 2 weeks after final dose), instead of negative test results;
AND
- will wear a mask/face covering at all times at the venue.
If you are unable to adhere to any of these requirements and purchased your tickets directly through the venue (via Prekindle), you may request a refund at this link: https://www.prekindle.com/support .
We understand the challenges the virus has caused for all of us and truly appreciate your understanding during these times. Like you, we look forward to the day when we are back to conducting business as usual.
Doors @ 7:00pm
Show @ 8:00pm
All Ages
Full Bar
Free On-Site Parking
TICKETS
GA $20/$25
VIP $40
KIM RICHEY
“I started off that record scared to death,” Kim Richey recalls of making Glimmer with producer Hugh Padgham back in 1999 in New York and London. A disastrous haircut, unfamiliar musicians, and oversized budgets didn’t help matters. “It wasn’t the way I was used to making records.”
The way Richey was used to making records was with friends in a vibed-out, low-key setting. That’s how she made her debut album with Richard Bennett, and it’s how she made her new album, Long Way Back… The Songs of Glimmer, with Doug Lancio. So Glimmer was different, and not just on the production side.
Then, as now, the compositions that comprise Glimmer were the Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter’s first collection of true confessionals. Prior to that she’d been a staff writer at Blue Water Music writing from a more arm’s-length vantage point for her first two releases, 1995’s Kim Richey and 1997’s Bitter Sweet. But Glimmer was all her.
Revisiting that history for A Long Way Back was both emotional and edifying for her. “I was pretty broken-hearted when I wrote and recorded most of those songs and I remember feeling that way,” she says. “At the time, I needed to really get out of my head and out of Nashville. I think that was what appealed to me so much about making a record somewhere that wasn’t home and with new people. Recording these songs again was a good way to look back and remember I made it through those times.”
The 20 years of distance between then and now provided another benefit, as well: Richey is more comfortable with her voice, both literally and metaphorically. As a result, Long Way Back sounds like it has nothing to prove and nothing to hide. It’s more spacious, but not less spirited, with Richey’s voice, in particular, feeling more relaxed and rounded than on the original. Starting with “Come Around,” the 14 new renderings take their time to make their points, meandering casually around, much like their maker.
An Ohio native, Richey’s passion for music was sparked early on in her great aunt’s record shop where she’d scour the bins and soak it all in. She took up the guitar in high school and, while studying environmental education and sociology at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, she played in a band with Bill Lloyd. But it didn’t stick… not right away.
After Kentucky, Richey worked in nature centers in Colorado and Ohio and traveled to Sweden and South America. She eventually landed in Bellingham, Washington, where she worked as a cook while her boyfriend went to grad school. Their deal was, she got to decide where they went after he graduated. One night in 1988, some old friends — Bill Lloyd and Radney Foster — rolled through town. She sold t-shirts at their gig, and they talked up Nashville. To drive the point home, Lloyd sent her a tape with Steve Earle and others on it. So taken by the songwriting, Richey and her partner loaded up their Ford F150 and headed to Music City.
In Nashville, Richey cooked at the famed Bluebird Café and gigged around town at writers’ nights. At a show one night at 12t h & Porter, Mercury Records’ Luke Lewis approached her. In classic Richey fashion, she didn’t know who he was. Still, she went to a meeting with him and Keith Stegall, played one song, talked a lot, and got a record deal at the musical home of Billy Ray Cyrus and Shania Twain. Remembering the glory days of major labels in the ’90s, Richey says, “They gave me way more than enough rope to hang myself with. I could do whatever I wanted.”
What she wanted was to work with her friend, producer Richard Bennett. So she did. For Bitter Sweet, she put Angelo Petraglia at the helm, before turning to Padgham for Glimmer. “Bitter Sweet was recorded in Nashville with my road band and friends,” Richey says. “That record was as if the kids had taken over the recording studio while the adults were away. Glimmer was more pro and less messing around having fun. The musicians were all super-talented and gave the songs a voice I never would have thought to give them. Hugh was up for trying anything and really encouraged me to add all those vocal arrangements that ended up on the record”.
For 2002’s Rise, Richey took another left turn, signed to Lost Highway Records, and hired Bill Bottrell as producer. Though it was her first time writing in a studio with a band, the players’ talent and Bottrell’s whimsy proved to be great complements to Richey’s own rule-breaking style. The resulting record was quirky, confessional, mesmerizing, and masterful. And it officially set her outside contemporary country’s bounds which was fine by Richey, whose music had always broken barriers.
A greatest hits collection dropped in 2004, buying her some time to tour, write, and make 2007’s Chinese Boxes with Giles Martin in the UK, followed by 2010’s Wreck Your Wheels and 2013’s Thorn in My Heart, both produced by Neilson Hubbard in Nashville. The latter landed her at Yep Roc Records, where she also released 2018’s Edgeland, made with producer Brad Jones in what she has described as the easiest recording process she’s ever had, despite working with three different tracking bands in the studio.
Through it all, Richey has worn her heart on her lyrical sleeve, revealing herself time and again. “I started writing songs because of Joni Mitchell, probably like most women songwriters of a certain age,” Richey confesses. “I loved being able to write songs because I was really super-shy. I couldn’t say things to people that I wanted to say. If I put it in a song, there was the deniability. If I ever got called on it, I could say, ‘Oh, heavens no, that’s just a song! I made that up.’”
Though she could fall back on plausible deniability, with Richey, what you hear is actually what you get. “I don’t have a lot of character songs because I’m not that good at making things up out of thin air.” Even when it comes to the main narrator of a song like Edgeland’ s “Your Dear John,” Richey demurs with a laugh, “I do think that song is probably just another song about me and I’m pretending to be a barge worker.”
On Long Way Back… The Songs of Glimmer, though, she’s not pretending to be anything or anyone she’s not, and neither are the songs. Richey and Lancio set out to make a guitar/vocal record, but the songs had something else in mind, and that something included drums by Lancio’s legendary neighbor, Aaron “the A-Train” Smith, among other things. “Once we stopped making rules about what could and could not be on the record, the songs spoke for themselves,” Richey says. “I knew all along I wanted Dan Mitchell to play flugelhorn, and the two tracks he played on are two of my favorites. In the end, the songs decided.”
From her move to Nashville to her making this record, for Kim Richey, the songs have always decided.
MANDO SAENZ
If you read the liner notes on Nashville’s biggest albums, you’ll come across a name that is impossible to mistake: Mando Saenz. He’s become one of the most notable songwriters in country music and is establishing a sound uniquely his own. Hailing from Texas, Saenz is able to balance outlaw influences with melodic harmonies that are destined to be stuck in your head. There’s no question as to why he has over 50 cuts from some of today’s biggest artists (like Lee Ann Womack and Miranda Lambert). If there’s one thing that is definite about Mando Saenz, it’s his ability to be completely versatile, yet uniquely Mando.
From the age of three months old, Saenz lived the nomadic life of a self-described ‘army brat’. After his father joined the military, his family moved from his birthplace of San Luis Potosi, Mexico, to Fort Bragg, North Carolina; shortly after, to San Francisco, and lastly, to a small town in Oklahoma, before finally settling in Corpus Christi — all before the beginning of his fourth grade year. Around the same age, he began taking guitar lessons but didn’t stick with it. However, after a decade-long hiatus, Saenz picked the instrument back up again as a teen with a much different mindset. “I was kind of an MTV kid, so I was influenced by anything that was popular at the time. But my dad was always playing The Eagles, Bob Dylan, a bunch of the classics. I didn’t start getting into Texas music until college.”
It was then, while studying for an MBA in San Antonio, Texas, that a shy Saenz finally started playing in front of his peers. After college, he moved to Houston where his brother Marco owned a recording studio, AZTLAN studios. Soon after, he met his mentor (and future producer of his debut record, Watertown) John Egan, who convinced him to ditch his job at Whole Foods to focus on his music. “It was a good time to be a musician in Houston. A lot of us, like Hayes Carll and John Evans, were there together. I was in inner-city Houston, and it was just so cool—huge and unlike anywhere I’d ever lived.” The city would also become the place where Saenz would be discovered by Frank Liddell, award-winning producer and owner of Carnival Music.
After signing on as one of Carnival’s first musicians to possess both a publishing and recording deal, Saenz began writing full-time and eventually released Watertown. The 2005 album marked a pivotal time in Saenz’ life, “The first record was influenced by Texas and made in Texas, by a Texas producer, all of which you can definitely hear.” However, even as a deep-rooted Texan, Saenz started to feel the pull between work and home. So in 2006, he decided to pack up and move closer to Carnival headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee — where he started working on his sophomore album with Grammy-nominated producer R.S. Field, Bucket. While the album supported the sound of Watertown that was unmistakably Mando, the move naturally gave the album a more engineered sound, “The second record was more heavily produced, and being in Nashville, I had completely different songwriting influences.”
Saenz’ last release, 2013’s Studebaker, took notes from both. The album was named as one of Chron’s “50 Great Texas Singer-Songwriter Albums”, alongside classics like Guy Clark’s Old No. 1 and The Late Great Townes Van Zandt. The 12-track album, produced by Mark Nevers (Lambchop, Bobby Bare, Jr., Andrew Bird), is Saenz most lengthy project to date in his words, “the most band-driven record”.
Since the release of Studebaker, Saenz has focused on writing and adding to his list of cuts, one of the most recent being “Bad Boy” from Miranda Lambert’s newest album, The Weight of These Wings. He also co-wrote Jack Ingram’s “Midnight Motel”, Aubrie Sellers’ title track from her newest record, “People Talking”, and Frankie Ballard’s “Good as Gold”. He’s also co-written and associate produced two Stoney LaRue projects with Frank Liddell, Velvet (2011) and Aviator (2014). Recently, his song “Brand New Star” was featured on The Oak Ridge Boys’ comeback record, 17th Avenue Revival, produced by Dave Cobb.
Currently, Mando is gearing up to release his fourth full-length studio album, produced by Grammy-nominated (and original founding member of Wilco) Ken Coomer. “The new record is different, just like the others all differ from each other. I’m drawing from everything I’ve done and everything I’ve learned — but expanding it,” Saenz says, adding that the project has more co-writes than any album he’s made. Although he writes the majority of his songs at Carnival’s headquarters on Music Row, he set out on this record to truly immerse himself in the Nashville songwriting community by embracing and collaborating with strangers, including a handful of up-and-coming songwriters. In addition to co-writes, the album features a cover of metal legend Ronnie James Dio’s, “Rainbow in the Dark”, an idea that sparked from Coomer, who said, “It’s a heavy metal song, but also reads Townes Van Zandt.”