Old Crow Medicine Show

Ketch Secor (fiddle, harmonica, guitar, banjo, vocals) - Morgan Jahnig (upright bass) - Cory Younts (mandolin, keyboards, drums, vocals) - Jerry Pentecost (drums, mandolin) - Mike Harris (slide guitar, guitar, mandolin, banjo, dobro, vocals)
Mason Via (guitar, gitjo, vocals)

On their whirlwind new album Paint This Town, Old Crow Medicine Show offer up a riveting glimpse into American mythology and the wildly colorful characters who populate it. The most incisive body of work yet from the Nashville-based roots band-a two-time Grammy Award-winning juggernaut whose triumphs include induction into the Grand Ole Opry and double-platinum certification for their iconic hit single "Wagon Wheel"-the album pays homage to everyone from Elvis Presley to Eudora Welty while shedding a bright light on the darker aspects of the country's legacy. Fueled by Old Crow's freewheeling collision of Americana, old-time music, folk, and rock and roll, Paint This Town relentlessly pulls off the rare and essential feat of turning razor-sharp commentary into the kind of songs that inspire rapturous singing along.

In a major milestone for Old Crow, Paint This Town marks the first album created in their own Hartland Studio: an East Nashville spot the band acquired in early 2020 then transformed into a clubhouse-like space custom-built to suit their distinct sensibilities. "Over the years we've spent a lot of time and money in professional studios, but this was the first time we'd worked in our own place since back in the late '90s, when we'd hang a microphone from the rafters and record a cassette on our TASCAM 4-track," says frontman Ketch Secor. Co-produced by the band and Matt Ross-Spang (a producer/engineer/mixer who's worked with the likes of John Prine and Jason Isbell), Paint This Town also took shape from a far more insular process than their past work with such producers as Don Was and Dave Cobb (who helmed Old Crow's most recent effort, 2018's widely acclaimed Volunteer). Not only instrumental in allowing the band a whole new level of creative freedom, that self-contained approach helped to revive a certain spirit of pure abandon. "Doing it ourselves was a lot more fun with a lot less stress or pressure, and because of that we were way less precious about it," says Secor. "It all just felt less like a chore and more like a complete joy."

The seventh studio album from Old Crow, Paint This Town opens on its title track: a raucously swinging anthem that fully embodies that joyful energy. With its fable-like account of the band's carefree troublemaking over the last two decades, the track showcases Secor's uncanny knack for packing so much detailed storytelling into a single line (e.g., "We were teenage troubadours hopping on box cars for a hell of a one-way ride"). "Our band has always drawn its inspiration from those elemental American places, where water towers profess town names, where the Waffle House and the gas station are the only spots to gather," says Secor. "This is the scenery for folk music in the 21st century, and the John Henrys and Casey Joneses of today are the youth who rise up out of these aged burgs undeterred, undefeated, and still kicking."

Although much of Paint This Town looks outward to examine the American experiment, Old Crow never shy away from the intensely personal. Written soon after the demise of Secor's marriage, "Bombs Away" puts a devil-may-care twist on the classic divorce song, while the gently galloping "Reasons to Run" invokes the Lone Ranger in confessing to the emotional toll of too much time on the road. And on tracks like "Used to Be a Mountain," Old Crow turn their lived experience into a lens for illuminating larger-scale problems affecting the modern world. "I spent about 25 years of my life very close to the region of Appalachia where strip-mining occurs, which is really dangerous work and destructive for all living things," says Secor of the song's origins. Partly informed by his memories of hitchhiking around coal country as a teenager, "Used to Be a Mountain" emerges as a galvanizing meditation on environmental catastrophe, boldly propelled by Secor's frenetic vocal flow and firebrand poetry ("From the fat cats, race rats, big Pharma, tall stacks/They're the ones digging the hole/All the way down to Guangzhou").

In one of the album's most potent segments, Paint This Town delivers a trio of songs that delve into matters of race and hate and systems of power, embedding each track with Old Crow's vision for a more harmonious future. On "DeFord Rides Again," for instance, the band serves up a gloriously stomping tribute to legendary harmonica player DeFord Bailey (the first Black star of the Grand Ole Opry, who was eventually banned from the show and left in exile). "One of the things that inspired that song was the experiences we've had traveling all over the world and seeing the people who take country music into their hearts," says Old Crow upright bassist Morgan Jahnig.

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Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/1633784-0?pid=176

Price: General Admission: USD 20.00

Time: 7:30 pm to 10:00 pm