Dave Hause & Sean McConnell

The Venue is pleased to present Dave Hause and Sean McConnell on Thursday, March 27th.
DOORS = 7pm | SHOW = 8pm

~ Advance Admission ~
Premium Reserved Seating = $30
General Admission = $25

~ Day of Show ~
Additional $5 Door Charge

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⭐ DAVE HAUSE ⭐
Since releasing his debut album, Resolutions, in 2011, the Philadelphia-born songwriter has poured his whole heart, soul and life into his music. That’s no different on Drive It Like It’s Stolen, his sixth full-length. Its 10 songs overflow with Dave Hause’s trademark urgency and passion, shimmering with a truth that reflects the harsh realities of life in this day and age, as well the intermittent jolts of joy that punctuate it. After all, his songs have always detailed his own personal traumas and triumphs within the setting of an unforgiving capitalist backdrop, tethering those personal experiences to ineluctable external forces. 2013’s second album, Devour, for example, was a response to his divorce from his first wife, while 2019’s Kick saw him tackle hope, depression, global warming and a crumbling American democracy with the news that he was to become a father. Most recently, on 2021’s Blood Harmony, Hause wrote and sang about the positive impact of having twins, and of the joy and excitement of being able to be at home with them for the first couple of years of the pandemic.
Drive It Like It’s Stolen is just as earnest and heartfelt, raw and real as anything he’s ever written before. Yet there’s also a subtle yet significant difference—here he’s delving into a more fictional type of storytelling to create what he terms "post-apocalyptic Americana.” That’s clear from the title of this album’s haunting and ominous opening song, “Cheap Seats (New Year’s Day, NYC, 2042)”. Set two decades in the future, it’s obviously not about anything that’s actually happened, but is still very much inspired by life. At the start of 2022, Hause was in a good place. He’d changed his diet and had maintained a strenuous workout regimen resulting in improved physical and mental health. Feeling great, he’d decided to go off Lexapro and left to go out on the Blood Harmony band touring.
“I was feeling great,” he recalls. “I came back to work, didn’t have my meds. But then I’m on tour, I’m not working out, I’m not eating that way anymore. And I’m really faced with the American city, the American experiment post-pandemic. We’re going places and being like, ‘Oh, my God, this is what Portland and San Francisco and Los Angeles look like.’ And it looked terrifying. Whenever I went anywhere, I felt like I was watching the prequel to 12 Monkeys, except I was also living it and just wondering what the fuck was going on. The tour was doing well, but it just felt like my mental health was falling down stairs. A few months later, when we were finishing the tour, we heard stories that people were siphoning gas out of tour buses. So, a lot of the record was kind of born of and trying to wrestle with that.”
To that extent, the future dystopia of “Cheap Seats” is very real—a vivid depiction of a society on the verge of collapse based on Hause’s experience as a touring musician and then filtered through his imagination. If “Cheap Seats” sets the tone with its dream of escape from a ravaged New York City, then song “Pedal Down” starts that road trip. It’s a gloomy, glowering, dark early morning ride through desolate, post-apocalyptic streets, whose atmosphere really places you inside that car. A moody and monochrome song full of portent and hope in equal measure, it’s both a literal journey—captured by the album’s striking cover, which replicates the view of one of his twins in the back seat as the family drives away—and a metaphorical exploration of Hause’s fears and anxiety of being a parent in modern day America. ‘But we lead our lambs to slaughter,” he sings. ‘It’s profit, boot straps, and guns/Every god needs a sacrifice/Honey, what have we done?’ On one level it’s a simple question directed at his wife about having kids. On another, it’s tackling the whole American system.
Drive It Like It’s Stolen was engineered and mixed by David Axelrod, and—like Blood Harmony—produced by Will Hoge and recorded at Santi Sound in Nashville, though with a different set of musicians than that album’s all-star cast. Yet that’s not to the record’s detriment at all. On penultimate song “Tarnish”, a song about both a life lived and one still being lived—past and present coalescing in a beautiful mesh of wistful self-reflection, Hause sings ‘I never got a golden record/I guess the melodies were wrong.’ The performance and production of not just that song, but this whole record, proves that sentiment entirely wrong. It’s followed by “The Vulture”, a song that harks back to the defiance that dominated Kick but which is recast with his children in mind. It feels, too, like the cementing of the thematic shift he’s making on this record. These songs may still be for Hause, but they’re increasingly less about him.“My life is getting increasingly less interesting,” he smiles. “And that’s by design. You want to be steady, you want to be at a baseball practice or taking your kids to gymnastics or whatever it is. You don’t want to necessarily be staring into the abyss all the time and trying to determine your existential weight. I don’t want my life to become fodder for songs—I want my creativity to be the fodder for songs.”
With this particular car ride, then, Hause is en route to a whole new world. Whether real or imagined or a combination of both, it’s time to buckle up for the ride.
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⭐ SEAN MCCONNELL ⭐
Sean McConnell has just one tattoo — his wife’s name. It represents a commitment, a sign that’s more than skin-deep. But on the cover of the Nashville singer-songwriter’s new album, SKIN, art and symbolism bloom like tattoo ink itself. An open palm beacons listeners, itself a symbol of his faith, while emblems of Earth and nature, faith and love serve as tangible and metaphorical guideposts along McConnell’s renewed musical journey.
“SKIN, to me, is kind of where I'm at on my journey with being comfortable in your skin, in your physical body. Divinity is in flesh and bone, not just in heaven somewhere, someday,” McConnell says. “Lyrically, the humanness of skin is obviously apparent, but I'm always attracted to this meeting of body and spirit, flesh and spirit.”
As McConnell crossed the threshold of 40 years old, he began to mine the depths of his identify as an artist, father, husband, and human. As such, many of the songs on the 11-track LP seek to find a sense of grounding in the chaos and change. The beauty of SKIN, however, is that McConnell manages to explore life’s paradoxes without needing to find answers. In fact, he hopes that the lyrics leave topics open ended for listeners to discover their own meanings. The songs themselves, grounded in steady folk-rock practices and uplifted through purposeful piano lines and swelling strings, leave plenty of room for such external observation and internal introspection to shine.
After 10 solo records — as well as countless works as a sought-after collaborator with country stars like Tim McGraw, Brad Paisley, and Martina McBride, indie rock acts like Bethany Cosentino (Best Coast) and Michigander, pop-rock groups like Plain White T’s, and on hit television shows like Nashville — McConnell has reached another of life’s plateaus. Such steadiness and consistency can be unnerving, though, especially as an artist still grasping for growth and greater truths. This contradiction, of seeing how far one’s come, while recognizing that it’s only part of the journey, is exemplified on “Older Now,” as he sings, “But I’ve got a ways to go / And in 20 years or so / Oh, this man I’ve come to know / He will seem to me a child.”
Ultimately, SKIN serves as a reintroduction of McConnell, in and out of his music. It’s about, “discovering that the journey inward, underneath the skin, is truly more expansive, perilous, and enlightening than any journey outward.”

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The Venue is brought to you by Fox Valley Music Foundation, dedicated to local music awareness, education and preservation. themusicvenue.org

~ TICKETS: We strongly recommend that you avoid buying tickets for our shows from any third parties. We will be unable to honor tickets purchased anywhere other than our website through Eventbrite or at our Box Office.

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Event Venue

THE VENUE, 21 South Broadway, Aurora, United States