Jeffrey Martin w/ Bob Sumner and Thomas Kozak at The Grey Eagle

Name: Jeffrey Martin w/ Bob Sumner and Thomas Kozak at The Grey Eagle
Start: 2025-02-22T20:00:00-05:00
Location: The Grey Eagle

Schedule

Sat, 22 Feb, 2025 at 08:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

The Grey Eagle | Asheville, NC

Jeffrey Martin
Doors: 7:00 PM
Show: 8:00 PM
ALL AGES
SEATED SHOW
LIMITED NUMBER OR PREMIUM SEATING TICKETS AVAILABLE

Purchase Tickets: https://www.etix.com/ticket/servlet/s/38213159

JEFFREY MARTIN
On a small corner lot in southeast Portland, Oregon, Jeffrey Martin holed up through the winter recording his quietly potent new album Thank God We Left The Garden. Long nights bled into mornings in the tiny shack he built in the backyard, eight feet by ten feet. What began as demos meant for a later visit to a proper studio became the album itself, spare and intimate and true. Recorded live and alone around two microphones, Jeffrey often held his breath to wait for the low diesel hum of a truck to pass one block over on the busy thoroughfare. During the coldest nights, he timed recording between the clicks of the oil coil heater cycling on and off.
Martin's fourth full length album, Thank God We Left The Garden comes out on Portland's beloved Fluff and Gravy Records Nov __. He produced and engineered it himself, recalling, "There was a magic quality to the sounds I was getting in the shack with these two cheap microphones, some lucky recipe of time and place that allowed my voice and the way I play guitar and the shape of these new songs to come together with the kind of honesty I was craving."
So much has happened in the world since the release of his previous album One Go Around (heralded by No Depression as 'the poetry of America'), and Jeffrey has filled the time doggedly, but happily, touring the US and Europe, watching it all unfold in a stream of small town conversations and city sprawl. In a moment where depth is so often traded for the instantaneous, where tech billionaires are building rockets to escape the planet, where the dead-eyed stare of artificial intelligence is promising to existentially upend our world, and where divisiveness in our culture is breeding delusional levels of certainty, Jeffrey Martin's new record feels like a hopeful and fully human antidote.
BOB SUMNER
Talking about traditional music—country, Americana, folk—gets a little sticky for Bob Sumner. His problem isn’t with the music itself, of course; one spin through his forthcoming sophomore album will assure you that the Canadian singer-songwriter can appreciate the finer points of steel guitar, fiddle, and strong storytelling. Rather, Sumner takes issue with the idea that the only way to honor the genre’s greats is to play music exactly the way they did. On Some Place to Rest Easy, you’ll hear countrypolitan strings alongside ambient sensibilities; tasteful synth tracks followed seamlessly by numbers with dobro and steel guitar. The result is an album that takes as much inspiration from the audio production of Randy Travis as it does the lyrical soul of Big Thief’s Adrienne Lenker—a melding of eras, sounds, concepts, and stylings that’s informed by the past, but never bound by it.
THOMAS KOZAK
Thomas Kozak is a singer-songwriter based in Asheville, NC. With a focus on lyricism and structure that stretches convention, he looks to bend an ear beyond the expected. His blend of intricate picking patterns and soft, dark vocals has led his music to be described as meditative and intimate. A poet as well, Kozak places considerable emphasis on his lyrics, which move beyond the classic narrative progression.
In 2019, Kozak linked up with the critically-acclaimed Americana artist Jim White (“Wrong-Eyed Jesus”/“No Such Place”) who would produce his first full-length album, “The Rubicon.” Engineered by John Keane and released on June 3rd, 2022, “The Rubicon” is an exploration of the ongoing life of the decisions one makes, traced through to a culminating acceptance, all against the wildly diverse soundscape Jim White is known for.
Kozak’s latest EP, “Our Lady of Embers” (2024), plays with the concept of divine intercession and the desire to construct externalizations of interior struggles in order to face them more clearly. All six songs were engineered by Mike Johnson (of Slowpacker) at Citizen Studios and Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville. Kozak's next project is set to be released in the late spring of 2025.
More can be found at www.kozakandthepoets.com or on social media (Facebook ; Instagram).