The Brothers Comatose, Kelsey Waldon, and more on Mountain Stage

Tickets: $25-$30

All tickets to this show are e-tickets and will be emailed to you upon purchase. Open up the pdf and the QR code on your ticket will be scanned at the door. This event will also be offered as a live stream.

About Mountain Stage
Since 1983, Mountain Stage has been the home of live music on public radio. Eclectic, authentic and unpredictable, the show’s varied guests have included iconic artists from John Prine and Townes Van Zandt to Wilco, Phish and Lucinda Williams. Under the leadership of Grammy Award-winning country and bluegrass star Kathy Mattea since 2021, Mountain Stage continues to bring surefire energy and mountain music magic to parts known and unknown.

Produced by West Virginia Public Broadcasting and distributed by NPR Music, each two-hour episode of Mountain Stage can be heard every week on nearly 300 stations across America, and around the world via NPR Music and mountainstage.org. Recorded in front of a live audience, Mountain Stage features performances from seasoned legends and emerging stars in genres ranging from folk, blues, and country; to indie rock, synth pop, world music, alternative, and beyond.

Watch the Livestream!
Mountain Stage livestreams are free, however, there are some incredible folks out there who’d like to show their support through a donation-based, pay-what-you-want “ticket” for the livestream. This is a donation-based “ticket” to show some love for the program and is not a ticket to the live event.

You’ll be able to catch the show from the comfort of your home (or wherever you wish) Sunday, June 23, 2024 – at 7 PM ET at mountainstage.org.

Kelsey Waldon

Kelsey Waldon is one of Country music's most singular voices. Across four acclaimed full-length albums full of both "heavy twang and spitfire pedal steel" and "coffeehouse confessionals" (Rolling Stone), she's brought listeners into her world and shared her own experiences and perspectives. Her new project, There's Always a Song (out May 10th via Oh Boy Records/Thirty Tigers), however, is about the singular voices that shaped her into the artist she is today.

"It's like, I kind of was able to find my voice through these voices, you know?" Waldon says. "A part of me doing this album is expressing so much gratitude for the music that I love, for music that has meant a lot to me and helped me."

These eight songs, from the earliest pages of the country and bluegrass music songbooks, helped the singer-songwriter from Monkey's Eyebrow, Ky., find her place in the world before she became an artist whose own work generates buzz, lands on year-end best-of lists, and, in 2019, led Waldon to become the first artist in 15 years to sign a deal with John Prine's Oh Boy Records. These days, they remind Waldon of why she wanted to make music in the first place.

"There's a lot of bullshit out there, and sometimes our goals and dreams get clouded by competition or become jaded. [These songs are] like something tapping into me and being like, 'That's why you love this.' It feels like home to me; it feels like the truth," Waldon shares. "It just brought me so much joy to work with my peers, my friends, people I really admire."

There's Always a Song might not even exist, in fact, if not for S.G. Goodman, who in addition to also being a fellow western Kentuckian has been one of Waldon's good friends since before they were making headlines with their music. During one of their frequent catch-up phone calls, Waldon told Goodman she would love to find a reason to collaborate and asked Goodman if she'd be up for recording a song together. Goodman suggested "Hello Stranger," specifically citing the 1973 version by Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard.

Waldon didn't stop with Goodman, though. Fellow John Prine devotee and "kindred spirit" Amanda Shires joins Waldon on fiddle for the Bill Monroe classic "Uncle Pen" — arranged in half time like Goose Creek Symphony's version from 1971 — while Isaac Gibson, lead singer of 49 Winchester, helps Waldon honor his fellow Virginian, Ralph Stanley, on the devastating "I Only Exist." Margo Price, one of Waldon's first friends in Nashville, rounds out the list of guests, singing with Waldon on "Traveling the Highway Home," which Waldon selected from fellow Kentuckian Molly O'Day's catalog.

Waldon's band, meanwhile, was a key inspiration for There's Always a Song. The songs on this album are among those they frequently listen to in the van while on tour; Waldon and fiddler Libby Weitnauer, in particular, have bonded over their love of old-time and Appalachian music. They'd been out on the road for much of the year before they entered Nashville's Creative Workshop studio (prominently featured in Heartworn Highways and a longtime Nashville staple) to make this record, which Waldon co-produced with GRAMMY Award-winning engineer/mixer/producer Justin Francis.

"These songs are deep. They were here long before me, and they will be here long after I'm gone, after any of us are here. They will survive the test of time," Waldon says. "It's like they live in some kind of universe that just survives forever. These songs know the secrets to life."

Waldon is featured in the 2024 edition of the Country Music Hall of Fame's "American Currents" exhibit, and she'll perform a special "Songwriter Session" on March 2nd at the museum as part of the exhibition's opening. 2024 tour dates will be announced soon.

Myron Elkins

Myron Elkins didn’t set out to become a full-time musician. After graduating from high school, the then 17-year-old instead became a welder in his hometown of Otsego, Michigan and had every intention of making that his career. However, fate had other plans. Three years ago, a relative signed him up for a battle of the bands at a local venue, despite the fact Elkins’ only prior experience with live music was playing at church and a few bars in the small Michigan town where he grew up. With just three weeks’ notice, Elkins put a band together featuring three of his cousins and a friend. Although the group didn’t win (they came in second), the experience opened Elkins’ eyes to a very different career path.

Now, at 21 years old, he’s poised to become one of music’s most intriguing new artists with the release of his Dave Cobb-produced debut album, Factories, Farms & Amphetamines, via Elektra/Low Country Sound. Across the album’s ten tracks, Elkins crafts sharp observations informed by his working-class upbringing, infusing his music with rich personal experience. “I actually wrote a lot of these songs on the album in my head while I was welding,” he says. “I just loved to play and write all of the time. Finding people who want to do that with you isn’t always easy, but we made it work. And with this bunch of songs, it made it all worth it.”

The Brothers Comatose

Whether traveling to gigs on horseback or by tour bus, Americana mavens The Brothers Comatose forge their own path with raucous West Coast renderings of traditional bluegrass, country and rock ‘n’ roll music. The five-piece string band is anything but a traditional acoustic outfit with their fierce musicianship and rowdy, rock concert-like shows.

The Brothers Comatose is comprised of brothers Ben Morrison (guitar, vocals) and Alex Morrison (banjo, vocals), Steve Height (bass), Philip Brezina (violin), and Greg Fleischut (mandolin, vocals). When they’re not headlining The Fillmore for a sold-out show or appearing at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, the band is out on the road performing across America, Canada, Australia, and hosting their very own music festival, Comatopia, in the Sierra foothills.