A very warm welcome return to one of Minneapolis finest musician’s , Chastity Brown. The rootsy troubadour, meticulous songwriter, & sublime & soulful singer. Chastity’s promoting her new album “Sing To The Walls” and is touring as a trio.
Tom Blackwell another truly sublime singer-songwriter whom we havn’t saw since before lockdown, opens the show.
Chastity Biog– As the daughter of a blues musician, Chastity Brown was born with an innate ability to channel complex circumstances into beautiful, uplifting songs. But after surviving the isolation of the early pandemic and witnessing the global racial reckoning that manifested itself in the riots mere blocks from her South Minneapolis home, even she is surprised to hear the way her new album Sing To The Walls turned out.
Like so many artists who endured the uncertainty of the 2020 lockdown, Chastity’s instinct was to turn inward, at first out of self-preservation, and then because the new songs kept coming and coming. Since finishing her last album, 2017’s Silhouette Of Sirens, she estimates she’s written nearly 100 new songs, 10 of which found their way onto Sing To The Walls. The albums a sonically expansive piece of work ; it mines the roots of Americana, folk, and soul music.
Tom Blackwell
Anyone who has seen Tom Blackwell perform in one of the small, forgotten venues across the North of England he has haunted for over a decade will have witnessed a truly sublime singer-songwriter distilling his blues, folk, soul and gospel influences into what Bob Harris has rightly described as, ‘Wonderful, heartfelt music’.
In 2018 Blackwell released the first of his Memphis series of albums. The new recordings are minimal, unadorned. There is nothing wasted or unnecessary cluttering the sound, just emotive vocals framed by quiet guitar and harmonica.
The essence of everything Blackwell does is in his singing voice – as plaintive and soulful an instrument as you could hope to hear. On stage he may punctuate with mournful harmonica and emphasise with expressive guitar, but it is the vocal that is the heart-rending centre of his art.
Blackwell sings his songs as if he is living them. Authentic songs that feel as if they are coming to you rolling across the plains and through dusty mid-Western streets. Songs that present all the emotional texture and depth of classic Americana – telling stories of bruised hopes, and fragmented settlements between yearning and loss – yet in a distinct, English voice.
Honest, without artifice, Blackwell’s music just is what it is, and that is something genuinely remarkable.