Live eTown Radio Show Taping with Bahamas and Jess Williamson

eTown’s mission is to educate, entertain and inspire a diverse audience, through music and conversation, to create a socially responsible and environmentally sustainable world.eTown Hallis located in the heart of downtown Boulder, Colorado. A world-class performance venue, full service recording studio and community center, eTown Hall is also home to the famous eTown radio show. A non-profit organization since 1991, eTown has been committed to environmental education and “doing the right thing.” This building, converted from an old church facility, is quite possibly the greenest music and media center in Colorado!eTown Hall is unique – not another venue in the country like it. It’s recycled (a former church), rebuilt (a total renovation from the ground up), renovated (state of the art sound systems, recording studio) repurposed (a green building that makes its own solar power, has extremely efficient heating and cooling, used recycled and repurposed materials in the renovation) and reinvigorated (the community LOVES eTown Hall!) .eTown Hall Refund and Exchange Policy:eTown does not provide refunds or exchanges for any ticket purchases. If you have further questions, please call us at 303-443-8696, ext. 100.When purchasing a ticket to an event at eTown Hall, you will be automatically signed up for the eTown mailing list. You will have the option to opt-out of this list at any time.NOTE:If you are trying to reach us over the weekend about a weekend show or event, the best way to get in touch with us is by calling our Box Office at (303) 443-8696, ext. 117. Someone should be on-site a couple of hours before doors open the day of the show to answer your call, or return your message as soon as possible.

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We're excited to welcome Bahamas and Jess Williamson to eTown Hall for a live radio show taping with hosts Nick and Helen Forster!

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Doors: 6 Show: 7 All Ages WelcomeNo Refunds or Exchanges

About Bahamas: “I think I’m always trying to get closer and closer to the source, like the way old blues albums were made—there’s no production; all the emotion you’re hearing is just the players, the room, the song. It’s almost like a photograph as opposed to a painting, where if you don’t like the color of a certain flower in the garden, you change it. I want you to hear every word I’m saying, and take in the song and make it your own.”The fifth album from Bahamas, Sad Hunk takes its title from a nickname bestowed upon the artist by his wife in reaction to how he was being portrayed in the media, “Something like ten years ago I did a photo shoot, and in all the pictures they sent back, I was lit half in shadow, looking all brooding and mysterious,” says the award-winning singer/songwriter otherwise known as Afie Jurvanen. “When my wife saw the photos the first thing she said was, ‘Whoa—sad hunk,’ and after that it became sort of a joke among our friends.”It’s a fitting backstory for an album that embodies an undaunted self-awareness, each track graced with Bahamas’s wry wit and unabashed heart. In sketching Sad Hunk’s delicately composed batch of songs, Jurvanen drew much inspiration from his home life and all the joy and struggle that comes with building a family together. Having recently moved to the coast of Nova Scotia with his wife and two daughters, the Ontario native inevitably imbued the album with his surroundings, even while committing to a sometimes-painful sincerity in his lyrics. “I definitely use music to work things out for myself,” says Jurvanen. “It’s possible I’m too open sometimes, but I really don’t know any better way to be. If I tried to just go write fun songs about hot dogs or something, I’d probably fail.”2018’s Grammy-Nominated Earthtones saw Bahamas joining forces with bassist Pino Palladino and drummer James Gadson (the rhythm section behind D’Angelo’s Black Messiah), and even merging them with his stable of longtime heavyweight musicians on Kimmel. Jurvanen created Sad Hunk with those same collaborators - Christine Bougie (guitar), Don Kerr (drums), Mike O’Brien (bass), and Felicity Williams (vocals). Recorded by longtime producer and multi-Grammy nominee Robbie Lackritz (Feist, Jack Johnson, Robbie Robertson), Sad Hunk is the next step in Afie’ virtuosic signature style of restraint as a guitarist. It also features the graceful guitar work of Sam Weber, a virtually unknown musician whom Jurvanen discovered on YouTube. “I sort of had a musical crush on Sam, so I invited him to open for us a few years ago and we ended up hitting it off,” says Jurvanen. “I asked him to come out and record with us without even knowing what I wanted him to play, which is generally how I like to work with people: I always think it’s so much more interesting when you let them find their way into the songs on their own.”An album born from charmed spontaneity and raw imagination, Sad Hunk unfolds in a genre-less groove-heavy and jangly sound beautifully suited for Jurvanen’s warm vocal presence. In its musing on what’s essential and what’s expendable in today’s world, the album offers up songs like “Own Alone”—a brightly kinetic track threaded with a bit of self-effacing wisdom (“Too broke to feel so wealthy/Too young to feel unhealthy/Too old to understand the selfie/Too far gone for you to help me”). “That song came from being fascinated by how being on our phones all the time changes us at a cellular level—it changes the way you think, it changes the way you operate,” says Jurvanen. “I’m not suggesting we become Luddites and churn our own butter, but I do think we need to question whether you really need to have this thing on you at all times.”Elsewhere on Sad Hunk, Bahamas slips into a tender examination of love and all its complexities. One of the album’s most revealing moments, “Less Than Love” finds Jurvanen owning up to his anxiety about the ways he might fall short of his family’s expectations (“Everything that’s left unsaid/All the books I bought and never read/Thank god she can’t see into my head/She’d see I know nothing”). Penned with co-writers Dee White and Pat McLaughlin (John Prine, Bonnie Raitt), the acoustic-guitar-driven “Half Your Love” shares a profoundly heartfelt outpouring of affection for his wife. “It’s the first time I’ve ever co-written a song, but I feel every line of it to the point of tears,” Jurvanen says. And on the album-closing “Wisdom of the World,” with its shapeshifting textures and unruly guitar solo, Bahamas presents a layered meditation on forgiveness and regret. “That one’s about my brother, who’s a recovering alcoholic and recovering addict and just got sober again a while ago,” says Jurvanen. “Writing it helped me to think about how to love people who are hard to love, which has been a recurring theme for me for a long time. Because no matter how you feel about someone, they still get to live their life. We all have to figure out a way to try and live together, even when it’s hard.” For all its moments of heavy-hearted reflection, Sad Hunk ultimately channels a certain lightness, the pure elation in expressing what often goes unspoken. “You say things in songs that you’d never, ever say in conversation,” Jurvanen notes. “But it feels really good to say those things. I don’t know why telling people the most basic things you’re thinking is so hard sometimes, but it is. ”In sharing the album with the world, Jurvanen hopes that his songs might inspire others to embrace their own sad-hunk tendencies. “We’re all sad hunks—we’re all these broken beautiful human beings,” he says. “The idea that there’s only one way to live life is so backward. So instead of listening to the noise, just get in touch with what’s inside and find something you love to do, and then do it well. And don’t let yourself be hard. Just be soft. Be as soft with each other as you possibly can.”

About Jess Williamson: Endless prairies and ocean waves; long drives and highway expanse; dancing, smoke, sex, and physical desire – the core images of Jess Williamson’s new album Time Ain’t Accidental revel in the earthly and the carnal. After a protracted breakup with a romantic partner and longtime musical collaborator who left Williamson and their home in Los Angeles at the start of the pandemic, the album’s reckoning with loss, isolation, romance, and personal reclamation signals a tectonic shift for Williamson as a person and as an artist: from someone who once accommodated and made herself small to a woman emboldened by her power as an individual.A daringly personal but inevitable evolution for the Texas-born, Los Angeles-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, Time Ain’t Accidental is evocative of iconic Western landscapes, tear-in-beer anthems, and a wholly modern take on country music that is completely her own. Above everything, sonically and thematically, this album is about Williamson’s voice, crystalline and acrobatic in its range, standing front and center. Think Linda Rondstadt turned minimalist, The Chicks gone indie or even Emmylou Harris’ work with Daniel Lanois. Ringing boldly and unobscured, it’s the sound of a woman running into her life and art head-on, unambiguously, and on her own terms for the first time.Last year, Williamson and Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee released I Walked With You A Ways under the name Plains; a critically acclaimed record filled to the whiskey-barreled brim with feminine confidence, camaraderie, and straight-up country bangers and ballads. After past records Cosmic Wink (2018) and Sorceress (2020), both released on Mexican Summer, Williamson felt primed to shift in a new direction. Revisiting what she loved growing up, simplifying her process, and making music with a friend proved to be the best step forward for Williamson.In early 2020, while getting used to the new estrangement and in quarantine with her thoughts, Williamson wrote and recorded the stripped-back standalone single “Pictures of Flowers” by herself at home. This experience became the foundation on which Time Ain’t Accidental was built. The song’s lyrical themes were terrestrial and plain-spoken, with Williamson’s voice set against a drum machine and paired with textural guitar by her friend Meg Duffy (Hand Habits). Soon, Williamson realized that musically she was just as good—better, even—on her own. Tours with Weyes Blood, Kevin Morby and Hamilton Leithauser, and José González bolstered this newfound self-assurance, letting her voice ring out in rooms the size of which she hadn’t played before.Amidst the uncertainty of the pandemic, Williamson began dating in Los Angeles and tracking demos centered on the realness of those experiences, filled with excitement, anxiety, and disappointment. The drum machine stuck around (this time in the form of an iPhone app), as did her determination to forge a new path as a truly solo singer and songwriter; as a woman finding the sound of herself without anyone else’s input. It was a lonely, but revelatory, period.The core essence of that time is summed up in the opening line of “Hunter.” “I’ve been thrown to the wolves and they ate me raw,” Williamson sings, clear-eyed and with resolve, having come out the other side. Though tumultuous, the process of dating in LA revealed the album’s North Star, which anchors the song’s chorus and the album’s underlying sentiment more broadly: “I’m a hunter for the real thing.”This theme comes up on the vivid torch song “Chasing Spirits,” when she sings, over whispers of steel guitar, that “the difference between us is when I sing it I really mean it.” The same energy resurfaces on “God in Everything”, with Williamson turning to the supernatural as a way of rising above the earthly realities of dating and rejection. “Being in lockdown alone, fresh out of a breakup, was a real hard time for me,” she remembers. “What I’m grateful for is having a period of stillness and desperation that forced me to turn inward and find comfort in a power greater than myself”.In the album liner notes, Williamson too included a quote from Carl Jung that was sent to her by a close friend during this era of uncertainty and upheaval. It reads: “To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans, and intentions, and change the course of my life for better or worse.”After many months spent alone and searching, Williamson finally found the realness she’d been longing for. First came the idea of Plains and the subsequent writing and recording sessions. Then, on one of her regular drives between her adopted home in southern California and her native Texas, Williamson found and rescued her dog, Nana, who had been abandoned and was running alongside a desert highway in New Mexico.But all good things come in threes, and she soon found new love with an old acquaintance in Marfa, Texas, addressed straightforwardly in the title track “Time Ain’t Accidental.” “We fell for each other when I was out in West Texas visiting a friend, but then I left to go back to LA,” Williamson explains. “I wasn’t sure if or when we’d see each other again, but I felt so full of love and I hadn’t felt that way in a very long time. I wrote this song the day I got back home. It’s really the story of a day together—we flirted by a hotel pool bar and went on a drive, we had a sweet night—and then I had to go, neither of us really knowing what, if anything, would come next.”Williamson brought the suite of demos and her newfound assurance to Brad Cook (who’d produced Plains) in Durham, North Carolina. The familiar setting fostered a safe environment for the deeply personal material, and Williamson unleashed her voice with total unselfconsciousness. They tracked her vocals in just a couple of takes for each song. “I kept thinking, ‘my voice feels different now – it’s been liberated,’” Williamson reflects. Cook encouraged Williamson to keep the iPhone app drum machine beats she’d programmed for some of the demos, then married it with banjos and steel guitars for an evident sense of old-meets-new.Williamson now splits her time between Marfa, Texas and Los Angeles. Time Ain’t Accidental, with its synthesis of traditional country instrumentation with digital effects and modern sounds, unequivocally embodies the energy of the two very different places that she calls home. The album’s artwork, subtly menacing and neon in awareness and strength, displays, in Williamson’s words, “that supernatural forces are acting all around us, that we can trust that we will be in the right place at the right time.”While Time Ain’t Accidental is remarkable for its bare confidence born of searching and longing for something real, Williamson also recognizes the mysterious whims of time that bricked her path (and she memorialized them on the title track). Ultimately, these unseen forces lured the singer back into her own. The timing was, indeed, no accident.

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Live eTown Radio Show Taping with Bahamas and Jess Williamson

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