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More than just a regular concert, eTown is a unique live experience! Audience members will watch the eTown Broadcast recorded before their eyes, complete with performances and interviews with both of our visiting artists, as well as the eChievement Award segment, eTown's opportunity to honor everyday heroes who are doing their part to make the world a better place. You won't want to miss it!

Doors: 6:00pm
Show Start: 7:00pm

Calexico

The ninth studio album from Calexico, The Thread That Keeps Us is a timely snapshot of the Arizona-bred band: a family portrait capturing their stylistic variety and unpredictability while still finding solace in limitless creativity. In bringing the album to life, vocalist/guitarist Joey Burns and drummer John Convertino found a spiritual home in unusual surroundings—not in Arizona, but on the Northern California coast in a home-turned-studio called the Panoramic House. Built from debris and shipyard-salvaged timber—and dubbed “The Phantom Ship” by the band—the grandiose house and its edge-of-the-world-like ambience soon made their way into the songs. The specter of California also had a powerful effect: as both dream state and nightmare, its infinite duality is mirrored in the music, giving Calexico a new direction and new edge. With less polish and more grit than ever before, The Thread That Keeps Us both honors enduring traditions and reveals Calexico’s confidence in songwriting, ultimately setting a whole new standard for the band.

As heard on the album’s lead single and opening track, the drama of the landscape directly impacted the making of The Thread That Keeps Us. Driven by sing-song melody and galloping rhythms, “End of the World with You” discovers an unlikely romanticism in volatile times. With its lyrics illuminating “Love in the age of the extremes,” the track is the perfect intro to an album that endlessly explores the contrast between bright and dark, hope and fear.

Working with their longtime engineer Craig Schumacher, Calexico co-produced The Thread That Keeps Us, gathering musicians from across the globe to dream up an earthy yet expansive sound spiked with jagged guitar tones and flashes of distortion. “There’s a little more chaos and noise in the mix than what we’ve done in the past,” Burns points out. Although that chaos has much to do with “where we’re at right now as a planet,” it also echoes Calexico’s dedication to constant experimentation. “Whenever we’re writing and we come up with something that feels too familiar, someone will end up saying, ‘That feels good, but let’s keep going and see what else we can uncover,’” Burns says. “It’s been really important to the arc of this band’s evolution for us to always keep on trying new things.”

Like “End of the World with You,” much of The Thread That Keeps Us captures the anxieties and unease of living in tumultuous times. But while the album draws a kinetic energy from all that uncertainty, its lyrics unfold with a literary nuance and sense of setting and character. “Instead of writing straight-up protest songs, I want to tell stories,” Burns says. Largely inspired by his wanderings around Northern California during the album’s production, the narratives embedded in The Thread That Keeps Us reflect on displacement, transitory existence, and—in Burns’s words—“returning to your home after being gone for some time and seeing how things have changed, and maybe not in the best way.”

Eric Andersen
Accompanied by Special Guest: Scarlet Rivera

"Eric Andersen is one of our finest singers and songwriters, in the most literal sense of that tradition… the most elegant of singers." David Fricke, (Rolling Stone Magazine) '

“A singer and songwriter of the first rank.” (The New York Times)

“An American master.” Robert Palmer, Ghosts Upon the Road liner notes.

“Eric Andersen is a great ballad singer.” (Bob Dylan – live on stage at the Oslo Spektrum)

Eric Andersen first came to prominence as a performer in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s and immediately became part of the Village folk and songwriter scene along with Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Dave Van Ronk, Bob Dylan, and was at the epicenter of the American Greenwich Village singer-songwriter explosion.

Aside from his own classics, he’s co-written songs with Bob Weir (The Grateful Dead), Townes Van Zandt, Rick Danko, and Lou Reed.

His songs have been covered by many artists including Mary Chapin Carpenter, Judy Collins, Fairport Convention, Rick Nelson, John Denver, Linda Ronstadt, The Grateful Dead, Peter, Paul & Mary, The Blues Project, Gillian Welch, Linda Thompson, and Rick Danko. Bob Dylan’s version of Eric’s song “Thirsty Boots” was released as a single on Record Store Day and also appears on the Dylan CD Another Self Portrait .

Over the past 50 years, Eric has toured the world and released over 30 CDs of original music including Blue Rain (Appleseed Recordings) his first live concert recording in Oslo with the band Spoonful of Blues, released in 2007. In the early 1990s Andersen recorded 2 trio-harmony albums with The Band’s Rick Danko and Norwegian singer Jonas Fjeld. He’s featured in the Joni Mitchell American Masters documentary, the Wildflower Festival DVD with Judy Collins, Tom Rush, and Arlo Guthrie, the rock film Festival Express and the documentary Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation.

In 1990 Eric won the New York Music Award for his album Ghosts Upon the Road, in 1992 the Spellemannprisen (Norwegian Grammy) for “ Danko/Fjeld/Andersen ” and in 2003 The Premio Tenco award with Patti Smith in San Remo, Italy, which is an award given to outstanding songwriters. Previous Premio Tenco awards have gone to Randy Newman, Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and Lou Reed.

The Eric Andersen and Friends Webcast was launched in June 2011 by Nevessa Productions Woodstock with special guests Happy Traum, John Sebastian, Joe Flood and Inge Andersen. Featured songs performed in the webcast were from his album The Cologne Concert (Meyer Records) which was released on CD and Vinyl in April 2011. The live album features Eric’s wife Inge Andersen on back-up harmonies and he is accompanied on violin by Michele Gazich. Mingle With The Universe: The Worlds Of Lord Byron (Meyer Records) was released in May 2017 on CD and Vinyl formats. “Byron was a born songwriter whose ceaseless waves of rhymespresented an endless sea for the ships of song.” All songs on the album featured the romantic poet’s stanzas with Eric’s music. Included are two original Andersen tracks: “The Curled Darling” and “Albion” which describe for the listener a taste of Lord Byron’s controversial and sometimes scandalous life, travels and writings.

Eric Andersen - Mingle With The Universe - Album Review

Coming September 2017 was an expanded long-play version of the Shadow and Light of Albert Camus (Meyer Records) will be released with two new tracks. The four-song EP was originally released in 2014 on Vinyl and in 2015 on CD. Eric extrapolated new lyrics from Camus’ novels. Of the original EP version, he said in an interview, "From the rolling vineyards of Camus I tried to capture four bottles of good wine that tasted deep and true."

Coming soon, in conjunction with Eric’s fall tours, this March 30, 2018 will see the release of a new album:

Sony/Legacy Recordings will be issuing THE ESSENTIAL ERIC ANDERSEN – A 42-track digital release, 33 track double CD release and 20 track double LP retrospective release covering fifty years of his recorded history from Today is the Highway to Blue River, and Ghosts Upon the Road and Beat Avenue and on to The Cologne Concert album and unreleased New York recordings.

Work continues on The Songpoet – a new eight-year-in-the-making documentary about Eric Andersen to be released in 2018. The Songpoet follows Eric’s remarkable 50-year journey in America and Europe that continues today as he writes and records with a poetic passion. With unprecedented access to Andersen’s life and his personal archives the film will be a study on the culture of fame, the fragility of an artist’s career and the integrity of the artist as it reveals the indestructible energy that drives the artist and writer Eric Andersen in short -- a glimmering mirror and portrait of his times -- The Songpoet.

Eric Andersen’s poetical songs have entertained and captivated audiences worldwide. He plays acoustic guitar, electric guitar, harmonica and piano/keyboards in concert and often performs with his great bands in America, Japan, and Europe. He performs songs which span across all his albums, including his early classics “Thirsty Boots” “Violets of Dawn” and “Close the Door Lightly,” as well as exciting new material from his recent projects like Camus and Lord Byron.