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eTown welcomes Billie Marten and Dean Johnson for a live taping of its nationally syndicated radio show and podcast. Each artist will perform songs and join host Nick Forster for an onstage conversation. The program is recorded live and shared with audiences worldwide following the taping.Doors: 6 p.m.
Show: 7 p.m.
All Ages Welcome
No Refunds or Exchanges
With every eTown ticket purchase, you're supporting the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. eTown donates $1 per ticket to Conscious Alliance, aiding hunger relief, youth programs and sustainable solutions for the Oglala Lakota Nation.
About Billie Marten:
Billie Marten loves to leave her mark on a good book — underlining important passages, scribbling ideas in the margins, folding the corners of pages into dog ears to mark her place. The 10 songs of Dog Eared serve that purpose, telling the story of who she was as she wrote and recorded it, cleaving her adolescence from her adulthood in order to move forward. She is the songwriter who finds wisdom in horses and encourages self-reflection while realizing she has barely begun her own. She is the singer who makes the chorus of “Goodnight Moon” as beautiful as a lunar corona and smartly lets dissonance slip between her voice and the band around her as she watches something she loves disappear during “Crown.” Bille is a consummate singer-songwriter who has dared to push beyond the limitations of that form and make a stunning record that marks a new page, suggesting what comes next through the strength and beauty of what’s right here.
With Dog Eared, Billie calmly posits herself at the top of the tree of not just British contemporary folk artists, but with British songwriters at large.
Billie Marten’s parents did not pretend to like Dog Eared, her fifth album but the first where she begins to tease out the trails and trials of adulthood. They were only two tracks in when a bit of dissonance brushed awkwardly against their ears, 1 minute and 50 seconds into “Crown”: “The minute you are gone / I lose where I belong,” Marten sings, holding that final forlorn note as the band bends slightly away in a sly bit of text painting. They called their daughter and admitted they didn’t really get it. How had the soft-voiced singer who had become a British teenage star gotten here, singing about addictions and neuroses above notes that didn’t seem to make sense? Sure, Marten was disappointed. But there was certainly some degree of delight, too, because it was suddenly clear she’d accomplished what she hoped to do with Dog Eared all along. She had slipped the stereotype of her past and, at last, made more than a merely pretty record.
The first time Billie and producer Phil Weinrobe spoke by phone, sometime in the summer of 2023 as she drove aimlessly through the Yorkshire Dales, they realized they shared a vision for what her next record wouldn’t be: another singer-songwriter album. That is, they didn’t want to recruit a band of beyond-capable aces only to ask them to stay out of the way, to support the songs rather than express themselves. Billie had spent the first decade of her career making music that put her in that silo and, as she neared her mid-20s, the claustrophobia only intensified. Patient and restrained, full of the space for which she yearned, Dog Eared is her entirely successful first step beyond it and into a record where songs become places for players to interact with Billie, where they tease out in real time what they are trying to say together. Billie’s singing has never been more nuanced or versatile than it is here, her songwriting never more rich or poignant. But on Dog Eared, she is simply and happily the band member who happens to write and sing, surrounded by an elite crew responding as she goes.
In July 2024, Billie flew to New York to try an entirely new way of working. In the year since their first talk, Weinrobe methodically built a band he felt would fit Billie’s demos. Vishal Nayak and Joshua Crumbly became the elastic rhythm section, supplying muted soul and subtle momentum. Weinrobe gathered a little fleet of guitarists, Michael Haldeman, Sam Evian, Adam Brisbin, and recruited keyboardist and pianist Michael Coleman, too. He also arranged for guests to drop in: singer and guitarist Núria Graham (whose 2023 LP, Cyclamen, had become a touchstone), superstar percussionist Mauro Refosco, Sam Amidon with his fiddle, Shahzad Ismaily with whatever spoke most to him in the moment.
Everyone heard the same edict anew: They had not sequestered themselves in Weinrobe’s Sugar Mountain studio during a steamy Brooklyn summer to make a singer-songwriter record. Play to and in the moment, he said, with each other. They would all perform together live, capturing human takes and not overdubbed perfection. Billie would mostly sing, another compelling instrument in a sterling ensemble. Her songs, Weinrobe reckoned, were strong enough to take care of themselves.
He was right. These 10 tunes remain perfect snapshots of Billie’s Gemini mind (in spite, mind you, of her astrological reluctance), as she both reconnects with the childhood that predates her early career and turns toward her own self-made future. Hanging on her every word and vocal turn, the band around her enhances and deepens them. Hear, for instance, the way the group first kicks up little clouds of dust during opener “Feeling,” then eases back beneath her, like a pillow meant to lift Billie. It is a song about the tenuousness of our existence, about how the divide between our most sacred memories (for her, her father’s large hands or playing on her grandmother’s rugs) and a permanent void is beyond razor-thin. “We are oh so lightly here / Softer than a rabbit ear,” she sings, the band pulling back again as if struck by her epiphany about how little we can actually know. They are, however, almost effervescent during “Clover,” an oxymoron-laden drifter about trying to parse left from right, up from down, reality versus delusion. Every time it arrives, the refrain, “I’m way above the atmosphere / I stare at cracks, and they disappear,” feels like a sunrise or a flower unfurling, any hard-won moment of briefly getting life right.
Where closer “Swing” is a wondrously ragged country-folk anthem about anticipating oblivion that suggests Big Thief sitting in with The Breeders, “Planets” is a brilliant pop paean to the possibilities of the future. Here is the promise of growing “grey and old” with someone else as the rest of the world spins toward chaos, rendered with the thoughtful care of Leslie Feist and Françoise Hardy.
The irrepressible “Leap Year” lingers in the space between those two, suspended forever among past, present and future. Written on Leap Day in 2024 while Billie wrestled with winter malaise in bed, her first non-autobiographical song considers a couple who can only rendezvous every four years, on our astronomical makeup day. They long for the future but cling to the moments they have. After she rewrote the second verse in Sugar Mountain’s stairwell, the band played the revamped song for the first time while Billie sang. That take is the centerpiece of Dog Eared, with Sam Evian’s epochal guitar solo perfectly framing a couple trying to feel their way forward while knowing they are destined to fail.
Billie loves to leave her mark on a good book, underlining important passages, scribbling ideas in the margins, folding the corners of pages into dog ears to mark her place. The 10 songs of Dog Eared serve that purpose, telling the story of who she was as she wrote and recorded it, cleaving her adolescence from her adulthood in order to move forward. She is the songwriter who finds wisdom in horses and encourages self-reflection while realizing she has barely begun her own. She is the singer who makes the chorus of “Goodnight Moon” as beautiful as a lunar corona and smartly lets dissonance slip between her voice and the band around her as she watches something she loves disappear during “Crown.” (Her parents, mind you, have come around. Dog Eared’s charms are, ultimately, that undeniable.) Billie is a consummate singer-songwriter who has dared to push beyond the limitations of that form and make a stunning record that marks a new page, suggesting what comes next through the strength and beauty of what’s right here.
About Dean Johnson:
With I Hope We Can Still Be Friends, his debut for Saddle Creek, Dean Johnson makes a pact with the listener: He will sing you his truth in the most heartfelt and charming way possible if you promise to keep an open mind.
The title partly stems from the playful way the Seattle-based singer, songwriter and guitarist communes with his audiences at concerts. “I hope you’re not afraid to talk to me after the show,” he’ll say, sweetly, before launching into “Death of the Party,” the album’s seventh song. Centered on the “energy vampire” archetype, the exasperating windbag we’ve all encountered at some point, its lyrics are at once intellectually biting and unmistakably hilarious. His tender voice rings out like the ghost of Roy Orbison or a misfit Everly brother.
“Words don’t come easily to me / I notice you don’t have that problem / It sounds to me you cannot stop them,” Dean sings over acoustic guitar strumming and gentle bass and drums, like the narrator in a dark comedy whose coming-of-age misadventures have made for an excellent film.
Dean spent years tending bar at Al’s Tavern in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood. There, he encountered folks of all stripes and regulars enthusiastically murmured about his budding musical greatness. There’s the best songwriter in town! Dean was a kind of local lore, a long-held family secret, before the singer finally broke out in 2023 with his debut album, Nothing For Me Please, at age 50.
“‘Death of the Party’ is a great example of that,” he says of the sociological experience of bartending. “Being in that environment, lyrics did solidify. If I was working on a song, it wasn’t unusual for some new aspect of it or a line that was too vague to suddenly come into focus.”
I Hope We Can Still Be Friends is essentially an anthology that bridges Dean’s earliest days as a songwriter with his present-day outlook and abilities. There are songs that have been in his setlists for years and others that will be new to fans. Each of its 11 tracks contains jocular social commentary or lovingly rendered affairs of the heart. The album’s songs about love and relationships offer another way to interpret its title, as a parting thought to an ex.
Like all of Dean’s cable-knit writing, the title is a clever banner for the album’s dual nature, the thing that binds its tragedy and comedy masks. Dean explains that he didn’t set out to make a concept album. It’s a coincidence that about half of the album’s songs are a bit sardonic and the other half are more lighthearted. The singer playfully refers to the former as his “mean” songs, which is why the album’s back cover is adorned with a warning that says “Beware of Dean.”
Like John Prine or Kris Kristofferson’s country-adjacent sound, devastating humor and economical profundity refracted through a barroom’s haze, the album is filled with easygoing twang, sad characters, universal truths and the absurdity of everyday life. “Carol” recounts the numb consumption and dissipating cultural attention that is besieging America. There’s a search for optimism amid meditations on dying in a plane crash in “Before You Hit the Ground.” Romance that is best forgotten steers “So Much Better.” Only Dean could weave electroconvulsive therapy into a gentle, chuckle-inducing missive on unbearable heartbreak.
I Hope We Can Still Be Friends floats in a liminal plane between timely and timeless, its minimalist instrumentation elevating Dean’s affecting voice to new heights. Recorded at Unknown Studio in Anacortes, Washington, the record was produced by Sera Cahoone, the Seattle-based singer-songwriter Dean describes as a “soulmate sibling.” Overdubbing took place at Seattle’s Crackle & Pop!
For the sessions, Dean assembled a small band of friends including Abbey Blackwell (bass, backing vocals), multi-instrumentalist Sam Peterson and Cahoone (drums, backing vocals), who created a familial tone on the already intimate album. I Hope We Can Still Be Friends, with its sharp observations and stirring personal insights, holds space for both intense reflection and emotional release. You may laugh or cry or both. In this sense, the album is powerful medicine, a way to both expose yourself to and inoculate yourself against the ugly, absurd, existential and heartbreaking. At its core rests a basic truth that is often difficult to remember or accept: Happiness wouldn’t exist without sadness as its counterpart.
On his uncanny ability to so clearly see and then encapsulate humanity in all its messy glory, Dean offers this core memory, drawn from his childhood on Camano Island in the Puget Sound. “I was raised on a bluff,” he says. “I’m not trying to make it sound dramatic, but I did have a sweeping view.”
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