Live eTown Radio Show Taping with John Craigie and Jobi Riccio

Doors: 6 PM

Show: 7 PM

All Ages Welcome

No Refunds or Exchanges

_____

More than just a regular concert, eTown Radio Tapings are a unique live experience! The show includes performances and interviews with both of our visiting artists, and an interview segment with changemakers from our local and national community who are doing their part to make the world a better place. As an attendee, you serve as a vital part of our eTown show, which will be broadcast across the country on our affiliate radio stations and all streaming platforms. Listen for your cheers on the radio, and to hear how it all comes together, in just a few weeks following the night!
Cell phone use, photos (from phones and professional cameras), and audio and video recording are all strictly prohibited during the radio taping. Thanks for your understanding, and for your help in allowing the artists and audience to be present for this special evening together!

About John Craigie:

Much like community, music nourishes us mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It also invites us to come together under the same roof and in a shared moment. In similar fashion, John Craigie rallies a closeness around music anchored by his expressive and stirring songcraft, emotionally charged vocals, lively soundscapes, and uncontainable spirit. The Portland, OR-based singer, songwriter, and producer invites everyone into this space on his 2024 full-length album, Pagan Church. Following tens of millions of streams, sold out shows everywhere, and praise from Rolling Stone and more, he continues to captivate.

“The music is always evolving and devolving with each new record,” he observes. “With my last album Mermaid Salt, I really wanted to explore the sound of isolation and solitude as everyone was heading inside. With this record, I wanted to record the sound of everyone coming back out.”

In order to capture that, he didn’t go about it alone…

Instead, he joined forces with some local friends. At the time, TK & The Holy Know-Nothings booked a slew of outdoor gigs in Portland and they invited Craigie to sit in for a handful of shows. The musicians instinctively identified an unspoken, yet seamless chemistry with each other. Joined by three of the five members, Craigie cut “Laurie Rolled Me a J” and kickstarted the process. With the full band in tow, they hunkered down in an old schoolhouse TK & The Holy Know-Nothings had converted into a de facto headquarters and studio, and recorded the eleven tracks on Pagan Church.

“At first, I knew ‘Laurie Rolled Me a J’ would sound great with a band, but we realized there was this chemistry between us,” Craigie recalls.

During this season, Craigie listened to everyone from JJ Cale, Michael Hurley, and The Band to Donny Hathaway and Nina Simone. He also consumed music biographies and documentaries on the likes of Ani DiFranco, John Coltrane, The Velvet Underground, and Neil Young. Now, he introduces the album with “Where It’s From.” Dusty acoustic guitar underlines his warm delivery as he warns, “Be careful with this feeling. You don’t know where it’s from.” Meanwhile, he plugs in the electric guitar on the Southern-style boogie of “While I’m Down.” Bright organ wails over a palm-muted distorted riff as he urges, “Come on and love me up while I’m down.”

Then, there’s “Good To Ya.” Setting the scene, glowing keys give way to a head-nodding beat. He laments, “Oh babe, I was good to you,” before a bluesy guitar solo practically leaves the fretboard in flames. The album concludes with the pensive and poetic title track “Pagan Church.” In between echoes of slide guitar, he repeats, “I sing a pagan song out in a pagan church.”

“Taylor Kingman suggested the title Pagan Church to me,” he reveals. “I liked the multiple meanings. The album cover shows all of us in front of Laurelthirst Public House in Portland, which is an important gathering place for musicians in the area. It’s almost a church in a way. However, the song has an entirely different meaning.”

An incredible journey has brought Craigie to this point. He has consistently packed venues across the country, gracing bigger stages each time he rolls through town. His annual #KeepItWarm Tour has become a holiday tradition as it supports regional non-profits focused on fighting food insecurity with a donation of $1 from each ticket purchased. Showcasing another side of his voice, he has recorded “Beatles Lonely” versions of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road, recording these seminal albums live to sold out audiences, and releasing them on vinyl for Record Store Day 2022 & 2023. Beyond touring with Langhorne Slim, Brett Dennen, and Bella White, he has also sold out his annual river trip on the Tuolumne River, just outside of Yosemite in California and graced the bills of Newport Folk Festival, Pickathon, Mariposa Folk Festival, High Sierra Music Festival, and many more.

In the end, Craigie channels the power of community in Pagan Church.

He leaves off, “I just hope you can hear the collaboration with this amazing band of musicians and hear the energy in the songs of people who are allowed to get out and do their art again in this chaotic world.”

Photo by: Bobby Cochran

About Jobi Roccio:

“I’ve always felt pulled in a lot of directions,” says Jobi Riccio. “It feels like I exist in all these different worlds, and I can feel each of them tugging at different parts of me.”

It makes perfect sense, then, that Riccio’s stunning debut would be called Whiplash. Written over the course of several formative and tumultuous years in Riccio’s late teens and early twenties, the collection is a revelatory coming-of-age story from a writer torn between east and west, intimacy and independence, and her past and future. The Colorado native grapples directly with a variety of topics on the record, including facing past wounds and embracing her insecurities,  as she bares her truest self with raw candor. She explores her desire for connection and belonging with similar honesty, searching for a place to call home against the backdrop of an ever-evolving identity. Sonically, the album exists between worlds, as well, marrying the classic craftsmanship of Riccio's songwriting with modern indie-leaning production to forge a lush, expansive sound that feels traditional and experimental all at once. Add it all up and you’ve got an album that embraces its multitudes, a profoundly vulnerable work delivered by an artist navigating the complicated transition into adulthood with remarkable grace and maturity.

“When I was writing these songs, I kept coming back to this image of someone slamming on the breaks in a car crash and this idea of emotional whiplash,” Riccio explains. “That rush of stress and adrenaline felt similar to what I was experiencing as I emotionally processed my adolescence—almost as if I was being jerked around by one big life change after another.”

Born and raised in Morrison, Colorado—a tourist town near the foothills outside of Denver that’s home to Red Rocks Amphitheater—Riccio fell in love with country and roots music at an early age. She headed east for college but moved back home in March of 2020, wrestling with all the complications of finding herself and her place in the world while letting go of her childhood and the sense of grounding that came with it. Riccio was already starting to turn heads with her music by this point, performing everywhere from Sundance to the Rocky Mountain Folks Festival, but when she took top honors in the 2019 NewSong Music Competition, it seemed clear that the universe was calling her east again.

“My prize for winning was to go and make a record with Gar Ragland at his studio in Asheville, North Carolina,” explains Riccio. “Like me, Gar is a lover of all kinds of music, and so the first time we got together, we talked about everything from Joni Mitchell and Bruce Springsteen to Bonny Light Horseman and Big Thief.”

 Working out of Ragland’s Citizen Studios, Riccio laid down basic tracks for the album in just a few days, capturing bare bones vocals and acoustic guitar takes that she began sending out to a slew of remote collaborators in New York, Nashville, Texas, California, and Colorado. Strings, woodwinds, keyboards, and percussion all pushed the songs beyond their folk roots into more cinematic territory less bound by any one specific genre. As the pandemic eased, Riccio’s friends and fellow co-producers Jesse Timm and Isaiah Beard joined her and Ragland in Asheville to tackle the finishing touches in person.

“It was an unusual approach to making a record, but I think it came together in a really special way because of that,” reflects Riccio, who now calls Nashville home. “These songs are a patchwork that all come from different moments in my life and different versions of myself, and the recordings function in a similar way, bringing together all these different players from all these different places and weaving them around my stories and my voice.”

That emotional and sonic patchwork is plain to hear on Whiplash, which opens with the bittersweet “Summer.” Written on the back porch of Riccio’s mother’s house in Colorado, the song is both gorgeous and aching, steeped in the loneliness and longing of youth. Like much of the record, it’s a snapshot of a particular moment in time, a self-portrait of Riccio at a pivotal stage of her development as she comes to terms with the myriad changes swirling around her. The elegant “Homesick” calls to mind Gillian Welch as Riccio makes peace with the changing nature of home in the face of growing older; the hypnotic “Driving” lands somewhere between Nebraska and Two Hands with its gut-wrenching meditation on numbness and escape; and the swaggering “Sweet” offers hints of Sheryl Crow and The Chicks as it tosses social expectations to the wind in an affirming embrace of the self. “All the guys I meet / Just lead to dead ends,” she sings, “And all the girls I’ve wanted / Never had a clue / And probably don’t bat for my team / Even if they knew.”

It’s that sense of perspective that allows Riccio to see the bigger picture on songs like the tender “Lonely Tonight” or dreamy “Kinder To Myself,” which insists on healing and forgiveness in the face of trauma and mistakes. Growth, of course, isn’t always a linear process, and there are inevitable setbacks and lessons to be learned and re-learned along the way. Rather than lament this, though, Riccio celebrates it as a fundamental piece of her humanity, finding the beauty in unrequited love on “For Me It’s You” or zeroing in on the power of uncertainty in the title track. “I am dizzy  / With my memories,” she sings over top of her distinctively lyrical guitar work, which walks the line between the Joni Mitchell and George Shuffler. “The feeling of time spinning past  / I’ve got whiplash.”

“It’s painful to change and move and grieve the loss of your childhood and the place you called home,” says Riccio. “But it’s also an intrinsic part of being alive and growing up and becoming the person you’re meant to be.”

 With Whiplash, Jobi Riccio is well on her way.

Photo by: Monica Murray

Host or Publisher eTown