Lonnie Holley and Lee Bains

Name: Lonnie Holley and Lee Bains
Start: 2025-01-19T20:00:00-05:00
Location: Eddie's Attic

Schedule

Sun, 19 Jan, 2025 at 08:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

Eddie's Attic | Decatur, GA

**Lonnie Holley and Lee Bains live at Eddie's Attic!**
Lonnie Holley (born 1950; Birmingham, Alabama)
Since 1979, Holley has devoted his life to the practice of improvisational creativity. His art and music, born out of struggle, hardship, but perhaps more importantly, out of furious curiosity and biological necessity, has manifested itself in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, performance, music, and filmmaking. Holley’s sculptures are constructed from found materials in the oldest tradition of African American sculpture. Objects, already imbued with cultural and artistic metaphor, are combined into narrative sculptures that commemorate places, people, and events. His work is now in collections of major museums throughout the world (The Museums of Fine Arts, San Francisco; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Smithsonian American Art Museum; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and many others), on permanent display in the United Nations, and been displayed in the White House Rose Garden.
Holley did not start making and performing music in a studio nor does his creative process mirror that of the typical musician. His music and lyrics are improvised on the spot and morph and evolve with every event, concert, and recording. In Holley’s original art environment, he would construct and deconstruct his visual works, repurposing their elements for new pieces. This often led to the transfer of individual narratives into the new work creating a cumulative composite image that has depth and purpose beyond its original singular meaning. The layers of sound in Holley’s music, likewise, are the result of decades of evolving experimentation.
Holley has released five critically acclaimed albums––Just Before Music, 2012; Keeping a Record of It, 2013; MITH, 2018; National Freedom, 2020; Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection (with Matthew E. White), 2021. His sixth album, Oh Me Oh My, produced by Jacknife Lee, which includes collaborations with Bon Iver, Michael Stipe (REM), Moor Mother, Sharon Van Etten, and Rokia Koné, comes out March 10, 2023, on Jagjaguwar.
He has toured extensively throughout the United States, Europe, Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand, and shared stages with Bon Iver, Animal Collective, Deerhunter, Bill Callahan, Saul Williams, Tinariwen, Daniel Lanois, and many others.
He has also experimented with film, photography, and video throughout his career. His directorial debut, the short narrative film I Snuck Off the Slave Ship, premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.
The 2023 podcast, Unreformed: The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, follows the history of the infamous reform school in Alabama (which many refer to as a “slave camp for kids”) and profiles Holley’s early life and the struggles he and so many others suffered at the hands of the state of Alabama.
In 2022 Holley was named a USA Artist Fellow. His visual art is represented by Blum & Poe Gallery (Los Angeles) and Edel Assanti Gallery (London). He continues to make art and music from his home and studio in Atlanta, Georgia.
Lee Bains is a singer-songwriter and 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