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NC Native (and former Whiskeytown member) Caitlin Cary joins singer-songwriter Matt Douglas for a visit to the Emerald Lounge!
Purchase tickets for this show here:
The Small Ponds
Caitlin Cary and Matt Douglas met because it was fated. Or perhaps it was inevitable, since they both play music in the medium size town of Raleigh, North Carolina. But since destiny is, after all, inevitable, they spotted each other on their respective stages, were duly impressed, and they did meet. And because both of them make wonderful music, and because they’re a couple of smarties, they recognized the potential for beauty in alliance. The result is the fetching and forthright new music of The Small Ponds.
Caitlin Cary has played the violin and written songs since she was little, but fell into music as a life when she joined the seminal alt.country band Whiskeytown as it was forming in Raleigh, where she was a graduate student in writing at N.C. State. Since then, she has released four solo recordings, formed a reknowned all-girl super-group called Tres Chicas, and made No Depression Magazine’s top 20 of the decade list with Begonias, an album of duets with Thad Cockrell.
Matt Douglas’s training began with woodwind instruments, and he graduated as a contemporary music performance major from NYU. From there, he headed to Hungary on a Fulbright scholarship as a student of folk music traditions. It was there that he first picked up a guitar and began to write songs, which led to the formation of innovative pop ensemble The Proclivities, who recently released their second LP. Douglas has also lent his talents to the recordings of artists such as Josh Ritter, Erin McKeown, Mark Erelli, and Laura Cortese.
Today, The Small Ponds are eagerly poised to share their songs with a wider audience. New, fast friends, Cary and Douglas are busy creating delightful new music based around their combined talents and their penchants for clear-headed, clear-spoken lyrics, precise, knowing arrangements, wide-ranging, emotionally packed songs—all brought to life by a tender vocal interplay that may inspire new entries to the dictionary definition of “duet.”
For more info: thesmallponds.com
The Houston Brothers
Real-life siblings, Justin and Matt Faircloth formed The Houston Brothers in the early aughts, a two-piece that played like a much bigger band and didn’t rely on loops or backing tracks to do it. Instead, The Houston Brothers used their multi-instrumental skills to make lushly textured, minor-key indie pop: Justin playing keyboard melodies and synth accents with his right hand, riding a snare and high hat with his left, beating time on a kick-drum, and singing lead; Matt playing rhythm and solo guitar,pushing bass pedals with his feet, and singing harmonies.
They underwent a number of lineup changes over the past couple years, working with as many as six band members and operating under the moniker, The Houstons. This lineup featured some of the Faircloths’ most rocking music yet and more introspective narratives. Yet even with the expanded lineup of talented musicians, it didn’t capture the same fire the brothers did as a duo, in studio or on stage.
For more info: houstonsmusic.com
Kristin Diable and the City
Kristin Diable has slept in cars and played Carnegie Hall. She’s as enigmatic as she is familiar, a poignant songwriter with a voice that flows like a molasses and whiskey current of a slow Southern river. Her music is equally at home in a barroom as in a house of worship. In a whisper she’ll convince you that she’s going to get to heaven by breaking through the back door.
Kristin Diable was born on Mother’s Day in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a stone’s throw from the mighty Mississippi. Her given name is itself indicative of the juxtaposition embodied in her sound (Kristin, a “Follower of Christ,” and Diable , the French for “Devil”). To hear her voice – to simply lay eyes on her – makes clear that both parties had a hand in her creation.
But it’s through this artist’s evolution that we fortunate souls come to understand that rarely do we meet a performer so in the now who maintains such distinct musical integrity. Her melodic compositions and strong, simple arrangements hearken to a soulful yesteryear with a diversity and depth clearly reminiscent of broad influences ranging from Neil Young to Nina Simone and Big Bill Broonzy to Dolly Parton.
With KRISTIN DIABLE & THE CITY, she pays homage to her ‘roots music’ foundations. Diable’s 60′s Folk, Blues and Soul influences are immediately distinguishable in this 12-track modern-day classic that delivers timely messages through an authentically original voice. The music at once embraces and challenges the nature and exclusivity of opposites, of the micro and macro, the internal and external, of personal and societal victories and defeats and the eternal push and pull of good and evil.
Recorded and engineered by Earl Scioneaux III of New Orleans’ iconic Preservation Hall, the core of the album was tracked live to capture the spirit that arises when music is played for the simple joy of the moment, nothing less or more. Music, at its very best, is truth: truth offered up in a new context that allows for beauty to be revealed through the cracks of our perception. KRISTIN DIABLE & THE CITY serves up a hearty portion of truth to anyone willing to sit, listen and connect.
As soon as she was of legal age, Diable left her home-town music scene and made her way to New York with the half-notion of finding something like Allen Ginsberg’s city of 1965, one of free-minded artists of common ilk running wild on the fat of the land. After selling most of her possessions to make deposit on a 150 square foot rooming house apartment in Manhattan’s East Village, she began building a buzz in the bustling Lower East Side music scene, quickly working her way up to regular performances at more prestigious downtown haunts such as The Living Room, The Knitting Factory, and Mercury Lounge.
Soul-fed and fed-up with the city life, she returned home in 2009 to New Orleans, the final frontier, where, building on the success of her regular appearances at the famed New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, French Quarter Festival and local venues such as Tipitinas, DBA and the House of Blues, she is fast establishing herself as one of this historic music city’s new wave of nationally relevant indigenous talent. She is a legacy artist in the making and her newest release gives a key-hole insight of what’s to come.
For more info: kristindiable.com