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Oxbow Live: Lydia Luce with Lisa/Liza and Hamilton Belk| Lydia Luce |
On her new album Florida Girl, Lydia Luce offers up a body of work graced with all the transformative beauty of watercolor, at turns delicate, dreamlike, and instantly potent in its emotional realism. The second full-length from the Fort Lauderdale-born singer/songwriter, Florida Girl matches its luminous form of indie-folk with an in-depth examination of Luce’s inner life, exploring everything from mortality to body image to the ineffable intricacy of human connection. As she bares her soul and unburdens her heart, Luce slowly embraces her own infinite complexity—ultimately arriving at the self-possessed state of mind that inspired the album’s title.
For follow-up to her 2021 acclaimed debut Dark River, Luce joined forces with her longtime friends and bandmates Anthony da Costa (Joy Williams and Michaela Anne) and Aaron Steele (Joy Oladokun, Portugal. The Man) to deliver her most intuitively realized and imaginatively composed work to date.
Luce grew up in a strict musical household where her mother was a professional conductor and did not present learning the violin as a choice. After graduating from Berklee College of Music, she briefly worked at world-music label Smithsonian Folkways Records, before relocating to Nashville and establishing herself as an in-demand session musician playing viola/violin for legends like Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson and hip-hop superstar Eminem. Luce also founded Lockeland Strings—a community arts organization and showcase of local artists (which included country superstar Kacey Musgraves) accompanied by string quartet arrangements.
| Lisa/Liza |
Lisa/Liza’s catalog spans ten years, with four albums on Orindal Records, a single released through Mexican Summer’s Looking Glass, and a spate of self-released home recordings. Her songwriting invites traditional folk guitar-playing and lyricism into dream-like domains, directing memory’s imperfections toward restoration and healing.
On her latest album, Breaking and Mending, the heavy, open-ended waltzes of her past work assume a more linear form, as Lisa/Liza carries on her tradition of shedding light on personal trauma and life’s greater mysteries through song. Questions about love and the natural world are met with moments of clarity, sparked by recollections of Judee Sill or John Prine. Above all, Breaking and Mending deals in dualities and the beauty of self-reconstruction, as carefully underlined in the opening track, “Felt Twice”:
They tell me “the body minds,”
they said that, the mind was the body,
Well each time that I fell,
I felt twice, What else can I tell everybody?
| Hamilton Belk |
Hamilton Belk is a songwriter/producer from midcoast Maine by way of North Carolina. His songs are slow-burning, humble affirmations that paradox is the only way forward, born on the shards of time between tours and recording sessions, wherein he daylights on pedal steel for bands like Cut Worms, Dead Gowns, John Andrews and the Yawns, Dylan Earl, and Jeffrey Silverstein. Belk's influences draw from classic country crooners, folk-noir, slacker rock, and the timeless, lonesome tears of the steel guitar. His work has been featured in installations at the Portland Museum of Art Biennial and Meow Wolf Denver. Debut album due in the fall of 2024.
[$15 ADV/$17 DOS | Doors 7PM | Show 730PM]
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Oxbow Blending & Bottling, 51 Washington Ave, Portland, ME 04101-2617, United States,Portland, Maine
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