SMITTEN: with Blue Cactus + Skylar Gudasz
Schedule
Fri, 13 Feb, 2026 at 07:00 pm
UTC-05:00Location
Cat's Cradle Back Room | Carrboro, NC
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Blue Cactus, Skylar GudaszFriday, February 13
Love Fair: 7 pm : Show: 8 pm
Cat’s Cradle Back Room
TICKET LINK: https://www.etix.com/ticket/p/66112758/blue-cactusskylar-gudasz-carrboro-cats-cradle-back-room
SMITTEN – A night for lovers, loaners and the lovelorn. Celebrate Valentine’s with Blue Cactus and Skylar Gudasz on Friday the 13h at the Cat’s Cradle Back Room. Expect hauntingly beautiful music, tarot readings, flowers, photo booth, and plenty of surprises. Fate says you should be there – 2.13.26
7pm: Love Fair
8pm: Show
Brimming with cracked-open honesty and electrified twang, BELIEVER cements North Carolina’s Blue Cactus as a leading force in modern country and roots music. Led by songwriters Steph Stewart and Mario Arnez, the group’s third album was written over a heavy two years following their critically lauded debut BLUE CACTUS and the glitz-and-glam sophomore album STRANGER AGAIN, as Stewart battled chronic health issues and the duo reassembled their musical careers in the wake of 2020. Feeling into an arid internal landscape, Stewart found microclimates of life as she hummed melodies and jotted down phrases. On BELIEVER, Stewart’s instinct for cadence and lyricism evoke Emmylou Harris’ spacious storytelling and the dusty Southern folk melancholy of Gillian Welch while Arnez holds space for each song, tending the soil with layered folk textures, genre-hopping arrangements, and bittersweet hooks. The result is a shock of color and energy, Believer blooming as delicate, prickly, and bold as a field of wildflowers.
As a departure from earlier records, BELIEVER features Stewart as Blue Cactus’ sole lead singer, her gossamer warble setting a foundation upon which the duo’s multiple vibrant musical communities build. Recording in the buzzy indie-folk scene of their home in the Piedmont of North Carolina, and later among the country sheen of Nashville, TN, the songs transform and journey through genre and mood.
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Skylar Gudasz has an easy way about her as she contemplates the futility of trying to order the world into shapes of convenience. “It’s wild, the ways that humans try to make boundaries out of things,” she says. The subject of this restless, eternal wrangling has been on the singer-songwriter’s mind as she’s watched the world splinter into jagged, conflicted pieces. With her third LP, COUNTRY, Gudasz interrogates borders of land and sea, mind and body: the limits of the lines we draw for ourselves.
Gudasz has concentrated her attention on matters of the mind and heart, last issuing a solo record with 2020’s Cinema (“★★★★ a career-making star turn” —MOJO) after her 2016 debut Oleander (“the Joni Mitchell the South never had” —Bitter Southerner). Between her LPs, Gudasz has registered a long list of extracurricular credits, taking up playing in the live bands of Hiss Golden Messenger, Eric Bachmann, Big Star’s Third, and spearheading the Ask Me Anything super trio tour with Libby Rodenbough and Kate Rhudy.
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Where is it happening?
Cat's Cradle Back Room, 300 E Main St, Carrboro, NC 27510-2359, United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
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