Head to Frog Alley Brewing in Schenectady on Friday, July 15th to catch Everclear’s 30th Anniversary show, along with performances from special guests Fasball and The Nixons.

Badfish and Red NOT Chili Peppers bring their Sublime and Red Hot Chili Pepper tribute shows to Frog Alley Brewing in Schenectady on Saturday, July 9th.

Please visit our Health & Safety Guide for more information regarding Masks & Vaccination requirements.

Demetri Martin is a standup comedian, writer, and director. Demetri won the Perrier Award at the International Fringe Festival in Edinburgh for his one-man show, If I. At the Melbourne International Comedy festival, his show Dr. Earnest Parrot Presents Demetri Martin won Australia’s Barry Award. Demetri has released three standup comedy albums and four hour-long standup comedy specials, including his latest for Netflix, The Overthinker. 

Demetri created and starred in his own television series for Comedy Central called Important Things with Demetri Martin. His books, This Is a Book and Point Your Face at This, are New York Times Bestsellers. His latest book, If It’s Not Funny It’s Art, features a collection of his original drawings. Demetri’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine. His first feature film, Dean, which won the Founder’s Prize at the Tribeca Film Festival for best narrative American feature film. 

Demetri has brown hair and he is allergic to peanuts.

Tickets On Sale Starting Friday, April 29th at 10am Local Time on LiveNation.com

Best known from the Comedy Central show Tosh.O, comedian Daniel Tosh is announcing more 2022 tour dates across the United States. Produced by Live Nation, the added shows will visit Burlington, VT, Portland, ME, Albany, NY, and more.

Saturday, June 25

Empire Underground

6:30pm doors * 7:30pm show

DES ROCKS & THE BLUE STONES

Tickets are $20 adv/$25 day of tickets on sale Friday, April 22 at 10am

Spoon’s tenth album, Lucifer on the Sofa, is the band’s purest rock ’n roll record to date. Texas-made, it is the first set of songs that the quintet has put to tape in its hometown of Austin in more than a decade. Written and recorded over the last two years – both in and out of lockdown – these songs mark a shift toward something louder, wilder, and more full-color.

From the detuned guitars anchoring “The Hardest Cut,” to the urgency of “Wild,” to the band’s blown-out cover of the Smog classic “Held,” Lucifer on the Sofa bottles the physical thrill of a band tearing up a packed room. It’s an album of intensity and intimacy, where the music’s harshest edges feel as vivid as the directions quietly murmured into the mic on the first-take. According to frontman Britt Daniel, “It’s the sound of classic rock as written by a guy who never did get Eric Clapton.”

While Spoon’s last album, Hot Thoughts (2017), bristled with drum machines, synths, and astral moods, the nonstop touring that followed in its wake tugged the band back toward a stripped-down sound. “I liked where we’d gone on Hot Thoughts – it had a specific style and it covered new ground for us – but we kept noticing on the road that the live versions of the songs were beating the album versions,” says Daniel. “And it got us thinking: The best rock music is not about dialing in the right patches and triggering samples. It’s about what happens in a room.”

It took some relocating. In fall of 2019, Daniel moved back to Austin from Los Angeles. A month later, guitarist/keyboardist Alex Fischel followed him with a car full of gear. The move to Texas added up for a lot of reasons: Daniel was born and grew up there, and his family never left. Drummer Jim Eno has his Public Hi-Fi studio in Austin, which allowed the band the luxury of recording at whatever pace they liked. Above all, regrouping in Austin would help the band break with the sound and the feeling of the last few Spoon albums.

That return felt like less of a homecoming than a jolt to the system. Here was an opportunity to write amidst the creative lawlessness that inspired Daniel to make music in the first place — a city where everything from outlaw country to psychedelic punk have long co-mingled at honky-tonks, house shows and backyard barbecues.

“We wanted to make a record where we could experience and draw from a scene,” says Daniel. “Where Alex and I could write all day, then go out and see Dale Watson at the Continental, then come back home and write some more.”

That scene would yield everything from the scorch and bite of “The Hardest Cut,” the first song written by Daniel and Fischel after returning to Texas, (“I spent a lot of 2018 and 2019 listening to ZZ Top,” Daniel explains), to the gentle dizziness of “Astral Jacket,” a ballad tracked after a night out at the now-shuttered Austin nightspot, Stay Gold. Bathed in atmosphere, it’s the sound of coming down – meandering Wurlitzer, brushed drums, and the thump of a timpani suspended in predawn stillness.

Working alongside producer/engineer Mark Rankin (Adele, Queens of the Stone Age) – and with contributions from Dave Fridmann and Justin Raisen – the band’s strategy was straightforward. “I’d come in with a couple new songs and instead of piecing it together like we did the last one, we said ‘Let’s rehearse it’,” Daniel says. “Let’s play it in this room over and over til it becomes something. And let’s just do it with as few instruments as we can.”

Halfway through the recording process, the pandemic hit. The studio shut down, but Daniel continued writing. “There are songs I wrote last spring [of 2020] that I wouldn’t have come up with otherwise,” he says. “It was that first-of-its-kind moment.”

The album’s title track snapshots a late night walk through downtown Austin during shutdown, steeped in the eerie dissonance of isolation and intimacy. Daniel explains: “I didn’t know where that image came from but it felt right, this idea of Satan sitting with me on my couch, staring at me. But after the song was written I figured out that the Lucifer on the sofa is the worst you can become – the bitterness, or lack of motivation or desperation that keeps you down and makes you do nothing or self-indulge. So it’s a song about the battle between yourself and that character you can become, the conflict being played out through a long night walk through downtown Austin.”

It’s also the song where the colors change, the lights turn down and the rules of the record go out the window, the way last songs on a record sometimes do. “It was always gonna be the last song. It wouldn’t have fit anywhere else,” says Daniel.

When the band reconvened in October, Daniel had a new batch of songs, and a fresh sense of momentum. “It’s certainly something we didn’t take for granted, that feeling of being in a room with each other,” Daniel says. “That moment was a once in a lifetime kind of feeling.”

Lucifer on the Sofa is the sound of that moment, a record of defiant optimism, the sound of a band cracking things open and letting them spill out onstage. At a time fraught with uncertainty, it’s shutting the door on the devil you know and never looking back.

• Andrea Domanick

The fourth annual Capital Region Thomas Edison Music Awards return to the MainStage at Proctors at 6 p.m. Sunday, April 24.

The Eddies is an opportunity to amplify, empower and celebrate professionals
working in the area’s wide-ranging music scene. 

This year, we honor 210 finalists in 36 categories for their work during 2021.
Nominations and voting are determined by a group of judges
representing the local music community. 

View the full list of 2022 categories and nominees at TheEddiesAwards.com.

The musical line-up for the 4th annual Capital Region Thomas Edison Music Awards will be Buggy Jive, Nite Train w/ Thomasina Winslow, Hot Club of Saratoga,
Rich Ortiz, the Erin Harkes Band and Super 400
with returning emcee Erin Harkes! 

Buggy Jive is a soul rock singer-songwriter who describes himself as “equal parts (Led) Zeppelin and D’Angelo and Prince and Joni (Mitchell).” He has been nominated in each year of the Eddies Music Awards including a record five nominations this year and was a winner of Video of the Year in 2021 for “Ain’t Going Anywhere.”

Nite Train w/ Thomasina Winslow is a seven-piece blues outfit that has been active in the Capital Region for 19 years; singer-guitarist Winslow joined the band in 2019, the year that the band was an Eddies Music Award nominee for best blues act. The band released the album “Cat on A Mission” in late 2020.

Hot Club of Saratoga is a gypsy swing collective that plays a repertoire that reflects the spirit and style originated by Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli in The Quintet of the Hot Club of France that was prominent in the 1930s. The act is a 2022 Eddies nominee for Best Jazz Artist.

Rich Ortiz is a singer-songwriter who has opened for Chicago, REO Speedwagon, Styx and many other touring artists. He is a three-time Eddies nominee for Solo or Duo Performer of the Year (covers category), having won in 2019.

Rock trio Super 400 has released one live and four studio albums in their 26 years. All proceeds from their sold-out Troy Music Hall benefit concert on March 23 will be donated to Ukraine humanitarian relief. They are 2022 Eddies nominees in the Rock/Pop Artist of the Year category.

Erin Harkes, a full-time musician and part-time comedian, was a 2020 Eddies Music Award winner in the Solo or Duo Artist of the Year (Covers) category and was a 2021 Eddies Merit Award recipient for her tenacity in developing alternative sources of income during the pandemic. She is nominated this year in the Record of the Year category for “New Year’s Day” and will perform with her seven-piece band during the awards ceremony.

The Eddies Music Awards are an initiative of Proctors Collaborative.

Catch a show with Honey Suckle Vine at the Brown’s Brewing Troy Taproom on Saturday, April 30th as they kick off the release of the new Nigel IPA. 

***This is a FREE show!***

Thursday, June 30

Empire Underground

7pm doors * 8pm show

THE WRECKS

“Better Than Ever Tour”

with special guests:

Girlhouse * Mothe

Tickets are $20adv/ $25 day of on sale Friday, April 8 at 10am through ticketweb.com and the club box office

Drive through the orchards to a beautiful field in back of the farm with a great view of the Helderberg Escarpment for a full day of live music and craft beverages. Dozens of producers will be bringing their favorite brews and ciders for you to enjoy, food made on site will be available.

Bands:
Jagaloons
Televisionaries
The Abyssmals
Brule County Bad Boys
Battleaxxx
Mystery Girl
College Farm
Ritz Carlton and more!

Commemorative Beer Glass is included in 21+ tickets only, extra glassware will be made available in case you’d like to purchase more than one glass. Beverages are not included in ticket pricing in order to make this festival available to all ages.

An opportunity for enthusiasts to both appreciate and participate, FreshGrass is a family-friendly festival, brimming with bright talent on four stages, and also in our galleries, brick-lined courtyards, and grassy field, produced in partnership by MASS MoCA, the FreshGrass Foundation, and No Depression.

The FreshGrass North Adams 2022 lineup is here featuring Gary Clark Jr., Old Crow Medicine Show, Trampled by Turtles, Yola, The Jerry Douglas Band, Aoife O’Donovan, and many more!

More about FreshGrass North Adams
Music starts early in the museum courtyards, moves to our spacious (and grassy!) urban concert meadow, and then continues until past your bedtime with wild and woolly late-night barn dances in the Hunter Center on Friday and Saturday nights. Concerts held rain or shine. The lineup is jam-packed with guitar gods and banjo gurus, traditionalists, and trailblazers — artists you already know and love interspersed with FreshGrass discoveries. Taken together, it’s an expansive group of performers who both draw on the past and look to the future. We like to think of it as “great music uprooted.”

The FreshGrass Award celebrates new talent, with cash prizes to the contest winners. Finalists in the band, banjo, fiddle, and guitar categories perform for a panel of industry professionals on Saturday and Sunday of the festival, with winners announced on Sunday afternoon. Open to all festival-goers, the contest showcases the future of bluegrass and roots music when the bands play original and traditional tunes. With prizes totaling $20,000, grand prize winners receive a performance spot at next year’s festival, recording sessions at Compass Records, and handcrafted instruments from festival sponsors.

FreshGround is a tent-camping field within easy walking distance (.7 miles; 12 minutes) of the festival, convenient to downtown merchants, bars, and restaurants. A shuttle bus runs continuously to the festival from the campsite. Camping will go on sale spring of 2022.

Stay tuned to freshgrass.com for the latest news—the music never stops at FreshGrass!

Subscribe to the FreshGrass | North Adams newsletter here and follow FreshGrass on Instagram and Facebook for updates and more.

Join us Mother’s Day Weekend in Albany’s Washington Park for a day of fun, free, family entertainment!  This year’s musical lineup on the EQX – REAL Alternative Main Stage:

1:30pm – Bad Mothers
3:00pm – Welshly Arms
4:30pm – Parquet Courts

All the info you need – click here!

Click the ticket link to register for verified TM fan presale access

General public on sale 4/8 at 10am

The National, along with special guest Lucy Dacus, make their way to Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown, New York for an evening of music on Wednesday, July 20th.

***TICKETS GO ON SALE FRIDAY, APRIL 1ST AT 10AM***