FREE SHOW || Ernie Hendrickson Band at Stix Ludington
Schedule
Sun Jul 28 2024 at 02:00 pm
UTC-04:00Location
Stix Bar | Ludington, MI
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Stix & NTL Productions presents... Ernie Hendrickson Band
July 28th!
Ages | All Ages
Show | 2pm
FREE SHOW
Event is rain or shine unless in the event of severe weather.
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For Ernie Hendrickson, the process of writing and recording his new album, Roll On, has been bound up in the changes he’s gone through as an acclaimed musician who is a perceptive chronicler of life in America, as a husband and father, and as an artist who remains open to the challenges and rewards that living this ever-so-complex American life can bring. What Roll On does so superbly well is bring life-affirming humor, wisdom, and even doubt, to the stories Ernie tells throughout the record’s thirteen songs. Ernie’s latest songs were written over a period that stretches from the release of his last album, 2013‘s One for the Dreamers, to late 2018, when he began recording Roll On with producer Brian Deck at Narwhal Music Studios in Bucktown, Chicago. Ernie Hendrickson’s journey from recording One for the Dreamers in Nashville–home of country music, Americana, and big dreams–to finishing Roll On on his home turf of Midwest, U.S.A., found him walking a path of self-affirmation and hard work that makes his new music his richest and most universal to date. In classic singer-songwriter fashion, Ernie writes about what he sees and feels, but Roll On is a record that speaks to the human condition in ways that transcend time and place. Recorded live on the floor with the most minimal of overdubs, Roll On represents Ernie’s art at its most direct carefully worked out. This is not a paradox, this combination of craft and spontaneity. The contributions of Brian Deck, who has helmed great recordings by Americana and rock artists Iron & Wine, Josh Ritter and Counting Crows. was, as Ernie enthusiastically admits, crucial to the process. Equally important is the sympathetic, muscular playing by a crack studio band that included guitarist and pedal steel player Brian Wilkie, bassist Pete Muschong, drummer Gerald Dowd and keyboardist John Kattke. Several songs are enriched by horn arrangements that suggest Dixieland jazz on riverboats on the Mississipi and Randy Newman. Roll On is a true fusion of songcraft and sound, and represents Ernie’s artistry as writer, singer and player in its fullest form. As Ernie–who realized a life milestone in 2016 when he and his wife celebrated the birth of their first daughter (they have another daughter on the way, due in late April 2019)–says about Roll On, it is the result of his ongoing fascination with and immersion in great American songwriting. There have always been elements of the Jerry Garcia-Robert Hunter collaborations in his writing, as well as nods to heartland rockers like Tom Petty and John Mellencamp, but Ernie adds another name to that list, that of Nashville songwriter and storyteller Todd Snider, whose irrepressible forays into American manners and mores he says influenced his work on the new album. “I kind of got plowed over by him,” Ernie says about Snider. After the release of One for the Dreamers, Ernie took the time to delve deeply into Snider’s catalog, and took every opportunity to see the masterful, mercurial songwriter play live. (He says he booked dates near Snider’s shows, so he could drive to see him.) You can hear Snider’s influence throughout Roll On, though it’s subtle, since Ernie has his own style of untangling and reassembling everyday life in unexpected patterns. The acoustic-guitar driven Roll On track “One More Pull” was, Ernie says, informed by his love for Snider’s “Just Like Old Times,” a song from the Nashville songwriter’s 2006 album The Devil You Know. Another major influence on Roll On was producer Brian Deck himself, who pushed Ernie to refine and edit the songs he’d written over the past five years. For example, Ernie began writing the beautiful “New Midwestern Winter Blues” in 2013 during a particularly cold, snowy Chicago winter. He road-tested the song, and realized it didn’t go deeply enough into what he wanted to say about his relationship to the reflection winter can impose on human beings. Deck saw the potential in the song, and asked Ernie to refine it. The result is a moving meditation on stillness, strength of character and forbearance, all themes of Roll On that Ernie explores with humor and a heart as big as the Midwest itself.
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Where is it happening?
Stix Bar, 1963 N Lakeshore Dr,Ludington,MI,United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
