Lee Bains with Matthew Thomas

Name: Lee Bains with Matthew Thomas
Start: 2025-04-13T18:00:00-04:00
Location: 410 Elizabeth St, Charleston, WV

Schedule

Sun, 13 Apr, 2025 at 06:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

410 Elizabeth St, Charleston, WV | Charleston, WV

Lee Bains is a Rolling Stone-acclaimed songwriter and New Yorker-published poet whose work is steeped in the American South. Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, and living in Atlanta for over a decade, Bains’s songs are hopeful, but far from naive.
On 2022’s Old-Time Folks (Don Giovanni), his fourth album with The Glory Fires, he delivers songs that mix sounds of the South — rock and roll, gospel, punk, soul, country, hip-hop — to deliver stories of resistance and love.
Challenging revisionist histories that would prefer to forget the worst parts of our collective past as much as the present neoliberal logic that reduces people to numbers, they celebrate the messiness of humanity and the power of solidarity and love.
PRESS FOR 2022'S OLD-TIME FOLKS
"The latest from Alabama singer-songwriter Lee Bains is a roots-punk masterpiece."�- Rolling Stone
"Lee Bains and the Glory Fires are known for their Southern punk rock bangers. But ... their latest album also includes country-adjacent ballads and dad rock — if your dad is an anti-capitalist preacher on unionized resistance and anti-racism."
- Washington Post
“Bains… specializes in erudite, poetic protest songs. The band's fourth album, Old-Time Folks … is its magnum opus, across which Bains' sweeping, anthemic songs become a channel to the South's past and present. He explores how the region has been misrepresented and sabotaged, and he pays tribute to those who have resisted oppression, from Indigenous tribes defending their land against settlers to union workers putting their lives on the line to strike. With Old-Time Folks, Bains offers his most profound work to date - an entire record that musically reflects the depth of emotion that he pours into his songs. He draws a line of solidarity that straddles Southern past and present, a reminder that no one is above those who came before.”
- No Depression
"The result is one of those records that contains a complete aesthetic and political world view, a song cycle like Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, in which phrases repeat in different contexts, each iteration deepening the others."
- Oxford American
“… excellent new album Old-Time Folks, a sprawling, Southern, punk rock epic about outlaws and revolutionaries from … Alabama and Georgia.”
- Bandcamp
"For a decade now, Lee Bains has been the irate poet of the modern American South, delivering rapid-fire deconstructions and excoriations of his racially and economically striated homeplace."�- Mojo
“Raw, rowdy and full of working-class fervor, Lee Bains is one of the South’s best singer-songwriters.”
- Arkansas Times