Lucinda Williams with Dessa, Chastity Brown, and Kiss the Tiger

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Lucinda Williams

2018 marked the 20th Anniversary of Lucinda Williams’ critically acclaimed, Grammy Award-winning, highly-influential masterpiece Car Wheels On A Gravel Road. In celebration of the milestone year for this milestone work, Williams will embark on a tour where she will perform the album in its entirety, followed by a second set of songs from her celebrated career.

The stories of the making of Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, and how long it took, is the stuff of legend. The changing producers, the re-recording, the revolving list of musicians only add to the folklore surrounding the album’s creation. However it came to be, one thing remains true, Williams never wavered on her vision for this masterpiece, and what she envisioned changed music on a multitude of levels.

Following its release, Car Wheels On A Gravel Road was named Best Album of 1998 in the Village Voice’s annual “Pazz & Jop” critics poll and received a 4-star review in Rolling Stone, while garnering critical praise throughout the press. The album went on to win the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. The influence of Car Wheels On A Gravel Road is immeasurable, and it is considered, much like Williams’ 1988 self-titled album, one of the cornerstones of what is now called Americana. Rolling Stone ranked it #304 on their list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”.

Williams will be joined on the tour by her incredible, long-time backing band Buick 6, featuring Butch Norton on drums, David Sutton on bass and Stuart Mathis on guitar.

Dessa

Dessa fell in love with language as a toddler---and she just never got over it. Coming up in Minneapolis, she collected favorite words to decorate the walls of her brain; as a teenager, she thrilled in metaphor; and when she started writing songs and touring, she'd always lean in to pick up on the regional slang (they say yinz instead of y'all in Pittsburgh; a beanie is a tuque in Canada; gotta ask for a lead to get mic cable in the UK). Now, Dessa works in most fields that traffic in words: she's recorded rap bangers as part of the fiercely independent Doomtree collective, released a live album with the Grammy-winning Minnesota Orchestra; contributed to The New York Times and National Geographic Traveler; delivered a TED talk on the intersection of romance and neuroscience that's notched more than 4 million views; hosted two seasons of the Deeply Human radio program (BBC/American Public Media/iHeartMedia); and published a memoir recounting most of the above called My Own Devices, published by Dutton (Penguin Random House). She lives in Minneapolis and Manhattan, still tours in a rented van, and is probably eavesdropping on the neighboring table, listening for a word to add to the collection.

Chastity Brown

As the daughter of a blues musician, Chastity Brown was born with an innate ability to channel complex circumstances into beautiful, uplifting songs. But after surviving the isolation of the early pandemic and witnessing the global racial reckoning that manifested itself in the riots mere blocks from her South Minneapolis home, even she is surprised to hear the way her new album Sing To The Walls turned out. 

Sing To The Walls is a sonically expansive album; it mines the roots of Americana, folk, and soul music, but Chastity’s stories are delivered in a style that feels remarkably timely, modern, and forward-thinking. "I celebrate the emotional richness in the tradition, but in my music I’ve committed myself to moving forward and reflecting the experiences of those overlooked by tradition." 

In the same way, her lyrics seek to reach across a great divide. “I will sing to those walls, hope it gets through / And I will sing to your scars, they need healing too,” Chastity sings on the album’s title track, a pandemic love song about breaking through the physical, emotional, and social barriers that have been constructed around all of us in recent years. By the next track, “Like the Sun,” she breaks through into a melody that rises like a wide-open prairie sunrise—a heart-rending moment that demonstrates her talent for expressing big, beautiful ideas in her music, and to create songs that radiate bliss.

Even amid the chaos, while delivering the release-valve verses of “Golden,” she remains steadfast. “I’ve got joy even when I’m a target, if you think that’s political don’t get me started,” Chastity sings, demanding to know: “Why have I got to be angry?” 

Between writing sessions she’s been vibing to chilled out, forward thinking artists like Leon Bridges, H.E.R., SZA, and Daniel Caesar, taking their cue to expand beyond genre and her folk/roots history to encompass her appreciation of all Black American musical art forms. “I also want to poke at what the blues is,” Chastity reflects. “It has a lot of stereotypes, like it’s mostly only played by blue-eyed white guys now. But what about Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey? I feel so closely connected, in a pure, undeviating lineage, to the heritage of being a Black, queer blues woman. I want to share this music with them, to say that I’ve listened, and I’ve done something new.”

“This album does not serve sorrow,” Chastity says bluntly. “And in that way, it’s my trying to emulate Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God—seeking personal spiritual fulfillment while rejecting expectations. What matters to me is my survival—and for my survival, it’s been necessary to try to embrace some joy.”

Kiss the Tiger

At a time when the world seems intent on pushing us further inward and further apart, Kiss the Tiger are here to rattle our bones and bust us out of our cocoons with some good old fashioned rock and roll.

Fronted by the magnetic and disarming Meghan Kreidler, who draws on her background in theater to break the fourth wall between audience and band with her righteous fist pumps and high kicks, this is a band that doesn’t just play. They combust. And watching them set the stage ablaze, it’s hard not to feel that tension that’s been built up in all of us these past few years slowly release, too, like a collective exhale set to ratcheting guitars, buoyant bass lines and Kreidler’s perfectly pitched screams. Theirs is a clean-burning fire. Hell, you might even call it healing.

Over the past few years Kiss the Tiger have set the Twin Cities ablaze, and there’s nary a club, block party, park amphitheater or backyard that they haven’t transformed with their commanding live shows. And their rigorous performance schedule has paid off: The band has never sounded tighter or more certain of its mission. Kreidler is backed on stage by her longtime partner and creative foil, Michael Anderson, on rhythm guitar, plus lead guitarist Bridger Fruth, bassist Paul DeLong, and drummer Jay DeHut.

Their latest album, Vicious Kid, is a tour de force through the band’s increasingly sophisticated songwriting, which is handled jointly by Kreidler and Anderson. There are plenty of moments where they embody the spirit of late ‘70s new wave punk, like in the ridiculously fun “Who Does Her Hair?” But they have started weaving in softer textures, too, like the crooning and feminist alt-country ballad “Grown Ass Woman” or the skeletal and simmering “Out of My Mind.” Unsurprisingly, Vicious Kid was named one of the Best Minnesota Albums of 2021 by the Minneapolis Star Tribune and highlighted as their longtime critic Chris Riemenschneider’s personal favorite that year.

In addition to exploring a wider variety of sounds and genres, Vicious Kid also features some of Kiss the Tiger’s most thought-provoking lyrics to date. In “Grown Ass Woman,” Kreidler pleads, and then demands, that she be allowed to cut her own path in this world—a message that dovetails seamlessly with Kiss the Tiger’s approach to making music. “The angel of death wants me to draw another breath/But angel won’t you leave me alone,” she sings and sighs. “Even near the end not a foe or a friend/Is gonna tell me what to do.”

In addition to headlining their own barn-burning shows, Kiss the Tiger have also been tapped to open for prominent acts like Lake Street Dive, The Suburbs, Ike Reilly, Jackie Venson, Black Joe Lewis, and Daughtry. They have also brought their act on the road to open for Philly’s Low Cut Connie, Austin’s Emily Wolfe, and fellow Minneapolis indie favorites Bad Bad Hats. Given how quickly they’ve won over the Twin Cities, Kiss the Tiger are poised to roar into more markets soon. Their transcendent, heart-forward rock and roll is right on time. -Andrea Swensson