with support from MICHAELA ANNE
Gates: 6:30pm
Doors: 7:30pm
Show: 8:00pm
Reserved Seating: $55
Standing Room: $40
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WATCHHOUSE
By the time 2019 came to its fitful end, Andrew Marlin knew he was tired of touring. He was grateful, of course, for the ascendancy of Mandolin Orange, the duo he’d cofounded in North Carolina with fiddler Emily Frantz exactly a decade earlier. With time, they had become new flagbearers of the contemporary folk world, sweetly singing soft songs about the hardest parts of our lives, both as people and as a people. Their rise—particularly crowds that grew first to fill small dives, then the Ryman, then amphitheaters the size of Red Rocks—humbled Emily and Andrew, who became parents to Ruby late in 2018. They’d made a life of this.
Still, every night, Andrew especially was paid to relive a lifetime of grievances and griefs onstage. After 2019’s Tides of a Teardrop, a tender accounting of his mother’s early death, the process became evermore arduous, even exhausting. What’s more, those tunes—and the band’s entire catalogue, really—conflicted with the name Mandolin Orange, an early-20s holdover that never quite comported with the music they made. Nightly soundchecks, at least, provided temporary relief, as the band worked through a batch of guarded but hopeful songs written just after Ruby’s birth. They offered a new way to think about an established act.
Those tunes are now Watchhouse, which would have been Mandolin Orange’s sixth album but is instead their first also under the name Watchhouse, a moniker inspired by Marlin’s place of childhood solace. The name, like the new record itself, represents their reinvention as a band at the regenerative edges of subtly experimental folk-rock. Challenging as they are charming, and an inspired search for personal and political goodness, these nine songs offer welcome lessons about what any of us might become when the night begins to break.
“We’re different people than when we started this band,” Marlin says, reflecting on all these shifts. “We’re setting new intentions, taking control of this thing again.”
When 2020 dawned, Emily and Andrew hatched a plan to break old habits: For the first time, they’d leave Ruby with Emily’s mom and escape with their longtime bandmates to a cabin on the edge of Smith Mountain Lake, a sprawling hideaway at the foot of the Appalachians. Also for the first time, after a decade of Andrew engineering and producing most of the music the band made, they’d bring help—Josh Kaufman, the producer and multi-instrumentalist who had wowed them with his work alongside the likes of The National and his trio Bonny Light Horseman. There were no expectations. This was simply a full-band retreat with a new friend and co- producer, working together in the refulgent sunshine of grand lakeside windows.
Almost immediately, they realized this wasn’t some audition; they were making Watchhouse. On the first day, Kaufman told Emily and Andrew to imagine this were their first record and to realize that conceptions of how they had worked, recorded, or even sounded belonged only in the past. In a way, Andrew had new permission and space to lean into his vision for what Watchhouse might become.
“Andrew is so confident in what he wants to hear, so full of ideas. Even beyond what we’d worked out together on tour with these songs, he knew what he wanted,” Emily says. “Having Josh in the studio meant Andrew didn’t have to bear the whole weight of getting there.”
Alongside drummer Joe Westerlund, guitarist Josh Oliver, and bassist Clint Mullican, Andrew and Emily indulged novel structures and textures. “Better Way,” a kind-hearted meditation on online meanness, shifts slowly from a bluegrass trot into a spectral marvel before an immersive acoustic drone frames a new future. The gentle harmonies of “Belly of the Beast” eventually turn into a tangle above baying strings, Andrew and Emily guiding each other through the shared perils of whatever comes next.
These songs, after all, started with a fundamental shift in Emily and Andrew’s life. In the first few months after Ruby’s birth, they split the day into shifts: Emily minded Ruby during the waking hours, while Andrew sat beside Ruby all night, watching their firstborn sleep as he quietly strummed strings. In those wee hours, he allowed his writing to wander, capturing the uncanny sense of wonder and intrigue that pervades the darkest parts of night. “If I didn’t have Ruby in my hands, I had an instrument in them,” remembers Andrew. “And watching Ruby sleep, being surrounded by that mystery at night, led to a feeling of magical realism in these songs. I used melodies and ideas I’d never use.”
Long-lost relatives, for instance, gather with him around the crib in communion during “Lonely Love Affair,” mentoring him through this staggering upheaval. He expresses the fears of a new father, alleviated by the possibility and goodness he sees in his sleeping baby. These songs allowed Marlin and Frantz to take the chance Kaufman proposed because they’re about the value of doing exactly that, of trusting in grand acts borne of personal uncertainty.
Likewise, Emily’s dual turns here as lead singer are absolute breakthroughs, equally wrought from the confidence of past success and the excitement of present energy. As Emily coolly considers the ups and downs of mere existence, “Upside Down” pirouettes from the country thump of Neil Young in 1971 to the surging epiphanies of Radiohead a quarter-century later. Andrew wrote “Beautiful Flowers” after crashing into and presumably killing a butterfly with his car—this quiet triumph is a history of the automobile that doubles as a poignant chronicle of the modern tragedies and miracles we normalize. It reckons with climate change and the fatal side- effects of our industrious, industrialized nature with beguiling humility. Emily delivers all this with a gospel conviction, astral horns slowly unspooling beneath her as a reminder of the fragility at work.
With harmonies so easy they sound like kitchen-table talk, Andrew and Emily sail through “New Star,” an ode to the self-sacrifice and renewal of trying to create something, like a child, that might make the world better. Revolutionary kindness, social responsibility, collective understanding: These simple but staggering ideas are the unseen threads of Watchhouse, a miraculous expression of measured domestic protest.
In our era of recalcitrant typecasts and incessant cultural churn, it is rare to witness anyone press ahead into the unknown while holding fast to what’s best about their past, too. That’s what Watchhouse have done with their self-titled debut. Emily and Andrew have discarded neither their tenderness nor thoughtfulness; instead, they’ve enriched those essential qualities by submitting to the risks of new sounds, structures, and inputs. They’ve embraced surprising notions that make their steadfastness stronger.
It will be tempting to summarize this record as Watchhouse’s inevitable parenthood record, or maybe the one where they got a little strange, or maybe the one where they change their name. It is, instead, a record about growing up without growing old, about experiencing the world and letting it change you, whether through the mystery of a newborn or the vagaries of improvising or the comforts of familiar and wondrous love. Watchhouse is a perfectly rendered link between their longtime allure as Mandolin Orange and an unwritten future as the band Watchhouse, one that’s only as hopeful as we can imagine it might be.
MICHAELA ANNE
Full of lush, sweeping arrangements and honest, deeply vulnerable self-examination, ‘Desert Dove’ marks a bold new chapter for Michaela Anne, both artistically and professionally. While the songwriting is still very much rooted in the classic country she’s come to be known for, the record (her first for Yep Roc) represents something of a sonic shift, incorporating more modern production elements than ever before in pursuit of a sound that owes as much influence to indie rock as honky tonk. Despite the bolder, more adventurous arrangements, Michaela’s crystalline voice remains front and center on the album, a pure, airy beam of light shining bravely into the dark corners of loneliness, pain, and desire that we all so often to try to hide.
Produced jointly by Sam Outlaw and Delta Spirit’s Kelly Winrich and recorded with an all-star band that included guitarist Brian Whelan (Dwight Yoakam, Jim Lauderdale), fiddler Kristin Weber (Kacey Musgraves, Margo Price), and drummers Mark Stepro (Ben Kweller, Butch Walker) and Daniel Bailey (Everest, Father John Misty), ‘Desert Dove’ is an achingly beautiful collection, with songs that frequently find themselves balancing optimism and fatalism in the very same breath. There’s an undercurrent of yearning in Michaela’s music (the melancholy “Be Easy,” for instance, chases a peace of mind that never comes, while the breezy “Child Of The Wind” longs for connection and permanence in the face of perpetual itinerancy), as well as a fiercely feminine perspective that’s assured in its power and unapologetic in its candor. The prostitute of the title track challenges the traditional perception of women as a source of comfort and service for men (“You love them all the way they want and they need / But tell me who does your heart wish to please?” she asks), and the spirited “If I Wanted Your Opinion” offers up an all-purpose response to gendered condescension.
Michaela first began garnering national attention with the 2014 release of ‘Ease My Mind,’ an old-school collection hailed by The New York Times for its “plain-spoken songs of romantic regret and small-town longing” and named one of the year’s best country albums by The Village Voice. After a move from Brooklyn to Nashville, Michaela followed it up in 2016 with the similarly lauded ‘Bright Lights and the Fame,’ which featured guest appearances by Rodney Crowell and Punch Brother Noam Pikelny. NPR said Michaela “works through weepers and hits the honky-tonks as every great country singer should,” while Rolling Stone compared her to Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, and Vice Noisey praised her as the antidote to commercial pop country, calling her “our saving grace, our angel, the person who will help usher us into a new age.” Songs from the record landed on high profile Spotify playlists as well as the HBO series ‘Divorce,’ and the album earned Michaela slots at Bristol Rhythm & Roots, Merlefest, and both the US and UK iterations of AmericanaFest, along with a seemingly endless series of dates across the States and Europe with the likes of Mandolin Orange, Courtney Marie Andrews, Joe Pug, Ron Pope, and Sam Outlaw.
Since the release of Desert Dove on Yep Roc Records in September 2019, the critical acclaim has continued. The album has received national praise from a multitude of outlets that include Billboard, Rolling Stone Country, NPR, Paste Magazine, Wide Open Country, Brooklyn Vegan, Albumism, Associated Press, No Depression, The Bluegrass Situation and The Boot. Regionally, Michaela has appeared in print in Nashville Scene and Nashville Lifestyles, who commented that, “The classic country-style songs sound as if they’re being sung from an expansive cave or a massive honky tonk… the effect is a group of acoustic songs with the brevity of country songwriting and the capricious intensity of indie rock.” The fall of 2019 saw Michaela’s debut on Mountain Stage while Philadelphia’s WXPN named her their Artist of the Month. Desert Dove has been appearing on multiple end of year lists including Albumism’s top 50 best albums of 2019 as well as both Stereogum and Rolling Stone Country’s top 10 best Country & Americana albums of 2019. Rolling Stone Country described the album as “a textured portrayal of turmoil and restlessness set to a mix of West Coast-country, atmospheric indie-rock indebted reverb and plaintive folk-pop.” while Stereogum considered Michaela as “hard to pigeonhole” with “a perspective so uniquely her own on Desert Dove, an album that paints a story of a life lived on her own terms.” They summed it up even more concisely, saying Michaela and the album were simply “impossible to forget.”