Rose Hotel + Spencer Thomas (of Futurebirds)
Schedule
Thu Jun 13 2024 at 07:00 pm to 11:00 pm
UTC-04:00Location
10 Buxton Avenue, Asheville, North Carolina 28801, United States | Asheville, NC
Eulogy Presents: **Rose Hotel + Spencer Thomas (of Futurebirds)**Thursday, June 13th, 2024
Eulogy - 10 Buxton Ave. Asheville, NC 28801
Doors 7PM || Show 8PM
**Rose Hotel**
Rose Hotel’s label debut A Pawn Surrender sees Atlanta-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Jordan Reynolds claiming her agency with a 10-song set of nuanced indie-rock songcraft that pulls from a palette of psychedelic shimmer and folk influence via her Southeastern roots. With a drive to pay homage to the legends of the art form, she uses the trappings of psychedelic rock not as source material, but as ornamentation, as she explores relationships, feminine rage, lust, temptation, blissful ignorance, frightening apathy, delusions, and illusions.
Where 2019’s I Will Only Come When It’s a Yes presented a coming-of-age tale, A Pawn Surrender nourishes the garden of adulthood with a cohesive but genre-spanning approach that Reynolds was empowered to achieve through a chess metaphor: “I was playing a lot of chess when I wrote this album, so I started to think about these songs as if they were all different pieces on the board representing varying aspects of my songwriting, personality, and experience. Each piece has its own specific purpose and its own strength to utilize, but you can't play the game with only your queen or your knights, or whatever. That became such a comforting idea and ethos to operate within – not just accepting variety but finding its inherent value. I went into the studio without any fear of being all over the board. I wanted to be limitless in letting my influences shine through the music in different ways. The throughline of Rose Hotel is my lyricism and my voice, but musically, I wanted to stretch out."
**Spencer Thomas (of Futurebirds)**
The songs on Spencer Thomas’ new LP, The Joke of Life, (out May 17, 2024), much like a good joke, are many-layered. His talent is immediately obvious, with sleek composition and production throughout. There’s a nostalgic, everyman flair to his music that doesn’t hang on the influences of the past, but uses them as a guiding light to elevate his voice.
Songwriting reminiscent of Warren Zevon’s later work takes the helm as Thomas examines the gap that can be left between the expectations of life and the sometimes tenuous reality. Songs like “Misty Eyes”, “Fake Rain” and the album’s title track “The Joke of Life” present light-hearted, even laughable, acceptance of the often undesirable cards we’re dealt. The album chronicles a period of change and rebirth for Spencer, who is no stranger to the open road. Beneath the album’s more obvious virtues is a wit and longing borne from the experiences and struggles of a working-class musician.
“The Joke of Life”, was recorded over the last three years with the help of a veritable “who’s who” of the Athens music scene and beyond, including members of My Morning Jacket, Drive-By Truckers, Reptar, Heffner and Futurebirds, for which he is the current touring keyboard player.
