Austin Singer-Songwriter Slaid Cleaves Will Perform At Old School Theater
Slaid Cleaves will take the stage at the Old School Theater at 817 South Main Street Friday night.
On Friday, Nov. 3, Foster Music & Arts presents Austin, Texas singer-songwriter Slaid Cleaves in concert at the Old School Theater. In addition to 25 years of performing around the world, nine albums, considerable Americana radio and chart success and critical acclaim, Stephen King has written his liner notes and Russell Crowe has covered one of his songs.
So who is Slaid Cleaves? Well, RollingStone.com says “Slaid Cleaves may be the Americana genre’s most underappreciated songwriter.”
Cleaves was born and raised in New England. While in college, he learned guitar and later spent a summer in Ireland busking on the streets in Cork. That was the turning point when he decided to become a full time singer and songwriter. After several local releases and many years working the Portland, Maine area, Cleaves moved to Austin, Texas in 1992. In 1995, he recorded an independent album called Life’s Other Side, winning the prestigious Kerrville Folk Festival New Artist competition that same year with the title song.
In 1996, he began his collaboration with Gurf Morlix, Lucinda Williams’ former guitarist, who ended up serving as Cleaves’ producer for his first two nationally distributed albums – No Angel Knows, which rode high on American radio charts around the U.S. and Canada in 1997 and the following album, Broke Down, with which he cemented his place in Austin, on radio, and across the US, Canada and Europe.
During the following decade, Cleaves released Wishbones (2004) Unsung (2006) Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away (2009, the one with liner notes from fan Stephen King), a two-disc live album (2011), and Still Fighting the War (2013), which was praised as “one of the year’s best albums” by American Songwriter and “carefully crafted…songs about the struggles of the heart in hard times” by the Wall Street Journal.
At the same time, the New York Daily News called his music “a treasure hidden in plain sight,” while the Austin Chronicle declared, “there are few contemporaries that compare. He’s become a master craftsman on the order of Guy Clark and John Prine.”
Cleaves will be on tour supporting his latest release, Ghost on the Car Radio, the second studio album he has recorded with Scrappy Jud Newcomb at the helm. On this record, Cleaves delivers a collection of world-weary yet defiant songs exploring the traditions of American small town life to help us all through these “interesting times.”
All tickets purchased online are will call. This show is sponsored by: Frameblender Films and Turnage Drug Store. Showtime is at 7 p.m. , Luke Fisher will perform an opening set, and all tickets are $20 general admission.
