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Event
Steve Gunn
This is an intimate living room performance in a private residence. Full details on the location will be provided at the end of ticket purchase.
TICKETS:
No paper tickets will be sent.
ADMISSION:
Print and bring your confirmation which will include the address and other details. Please don't share this info with anyone! In addition, your name will be on a list at the door. No additional tickets will be sold at the door. You must buy tickets here to get into this show.
DATE:
6/3/18
SHOWTIME:
6:00PM
SEATING:
This show will be general admission floor seating. Feel free to bring a pillow or cushion to sit more comfortably on the floor.
ALL SALES ARE FINAL. SORRY, NO REFUNDS:
Due to the limited number of tickets please make sure you can attend before you make your purchase. If you can no longer attend a show you can give or sell (at face value) the tickets to a friend. Contact us (livingroomshowlbc@gmail.com) before the show to transfer your tickets. We'll cancel any tickets resold for higher than original price.
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STEVE GUNN
People have written about roads for as long as theyve been around. And before there were roads, they still wrote about travel and about landscape. Landscape is the stage upon which our greatest experiences and desires play out. Steve Gunns music has always embraced expanse and movement. It springs from the simple and profound relationship between humans and their environment. Eyes On The Lines is his most explicit ode to the blissful uncertainty of adventure yet.
Gunns roots in the underground run deep, from his days in GHQ to his collaborations with Black Twig Pickers and Mike Cooper. Hes toured and recorded with Michael Chapman, and released two remarkable duo albums with drummer John Truscinski. His solo ventures, emerging over the past decade and culminating most recently the highly-acclaimed Way Out Weather, have been pastoral, evocative affairs. Here he embraces his urban surroundings through a series of songs that fully showcase his extraordinary ability to match hooks to deftly constructed melodies. Gunn is a consummate guitarist, that rare fingerpicker who can harness the enigma of the American Primitive vernacular without lazily regurgitating it. His playing is inventive and full of personality. His instrumental virtuosity calls upon a vast library of technical skills at will, but hes never showy his riffs and runs are always in the service of the song at hand.
And what a pleasure to have this music presented to the wider public.
This song cycle melds thoughtful inquisitiveness with poetic reflection, fully embracing rhythmic uplift, allowing personal stories and impressions to live their own lives on their own terms. Gunn is more narrator than diarist; he pours real-life moments and real-life people into vibrant and evocative tales. Dreams and encounters spiral out they form their own dramas and illuminate their own truths. Indeed, Eyes On The Lines works like a book of the finest short stories, its songs interlocking with an urgent necessity, forming an ever-questioning whole. In Gunns own words: The music isnt about me. Its about characters, either real or fictional. Its about images.
And what are lines if not one of the foundational aspects of images? Lines on the road draw ones attention to the lines comprising the landscape. Gunns music runs ahead and twists like time, like the road itself. Guitar lines are highway lines are lines carved by the view out the window are the lines one waits in to get a quick meal on the way from one destination to another are lines one draws in the van to stay amused. Its good to be out on the road and its good to be home, and each feeds into the other. This record sees lines run together and leap across one another.
Hes honest about the necessity of being comfortable in being lost. His music values the unknown, so it is always born of the present. We lose ourselves to find ourselves. With all of this comes humility. And gratitude. Listen to Nature Driver, a statement of thankfulness for the generosity of the plethora of kind souls who welcome travelers into their homes.
Ancient Jules, which opens the record, is a travel fantasy of a different sort. Built around a head-nodding motif, the song bobs and weaves its way through a tale which foregrounds the surprising joy that can come with a break a deep sigh in the midst of an onrush, punctuated by the finest example of Gunns electric soloing to emerge yet. A song like Conditions Wild also rambles through strange clouds of roving. Interlocking strings, percussion, and vocals join in an irrepressible rush. This record is like that the songs get lodged in ones head because theyre catchy, but their atmosphere sends the mind reeling into memory and mystery.
These are songs you can take in quickly, but spend all the time in the world devouring. The very large and the very small are present in equal measure. The inability to categorize them within the avalanche of impotent diatribes that pass for categorization is a testament to their power.
Stories give us ways to discover meaning. They provide us with signposts when we recognize our own lives within them, we clarify our existence. Far from the world is the mystic fool, Gunn sings on the opening track. The fool may be far from the world, but that doesnt matter. The so-called fool is jacked in to the cosmos.
Matt Krefting Holyoke, MA 2016
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LocationTo Be Announced (Long Beach, CA)
Displayed After Purchase
Long Beach, CA 90814
United States
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