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**Take advantage of advance ticket prices, as they go up the day of the show!** ADV: $16/$14 MEM; DOS: $18/$16 MEM
It takes courage to release the security of the familiar and embrace change. After five years of touring and establishing themselves as “the most important folk group to emerge from Boston since the early ‘60s” (The Boston Globe), Crooked Still announced that cellist Rushad Eggleston would leave the group in November of 2007. The solid foundation they built as a group earned them invitations from huge events like the historic Newport and Telluride Festivals and numerous rave reviews from publications like USA Today and Interview Magazine.
Crooked Still was now on the cusp of a new musical chapter. The quintet became five with the addition of fiddler Brittany Haas and Tristan Clarridge on cello and second fiddle. Lead vocalist Aoife O’Donovan told No Depression magazine, “When you’re in a quartet, and one of your members who’s been a huge creative part of your sound decides to leave, it definitely crosses your mind to just not do it. But we had spent five years building a name for ourselves. And if you look at almost every band that’s successful, there’ve been lineup changes.” If the first album from the new lineup is any indication, success for this young band will be explosive.
Crooked Still continues to perform one of the most compelling forms of alternative bluegrass and string band music today. The new five-member band converged to mingle their creative processes at Allaire Studios in upstate New York, with producer Eric Merrill, for Still Crooked. The album, released on the Signature Sounds label, balances unknown traditional material with three new tunes from the band, along with “Did You Sleep Well?” by fellow old-time musician Nathan Taylor and a Mississippi John Hurt standard. The entire album was recorded “live” in one big room, with everyone playing together. Merrill captured most songs in one or two takes. “I was outside in the hallway, because my voice is so quiet,” O’Donovan says. “Recording live, you don’t have an option to overdub; that always makes a better album.”
With Haas and Clarridge, the band has proven themselves to be even more adventurous, breathing their cosmic fire into old songs. “When Rushad left, we wanted to move in new directions,” O’Donovan says. “Brittney adds another female presence to the band; I can hear my voice in her fiddling. Tristan has a refined cello tone, with a powerful, restrained energy. They bring a fresh outlook to the arrangements that keep the music exciting.”
Still Crooked is an ensemble effort of inspired music-making that moves the bands’ impossible to pigeonhole style in new directions while honoring their folk roots. The album’s genre-bending sound is the combination of five distinctive talents who are not content to limit themselves to any one project or style of music. Crooked Still is Aoife O’Donovan (vocals, guitar, baritone ukulele, piano, glockenspiel), Brittany Haas (five-string fiddle), Dr. Gregory Liszt (banjo), Tristan Clarridge (cello, fiddle), and Corey DiMario (double bass, tenor guitar).
Rising star Gabriele Kahane opens. Prefix Magazine writes: "[T]here is nobody else within the pop-music sphere making music even remotely as sophisticated as what you’ll hear on Gabriel Kahane. This is music for the ears, the intellect and the soul, and an auspicious debut LP from one of the most prodigious talents we’ve got."
