Doors: 6 p.m.
Show: 7 p.m.
All Ages Welcome
No Refunds or Exchanges
With every eTown ticket purchase, you're supporting the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. eTown donates $1 per ticket to Conscious Alliance, aiding hunger relief, youth programs and sustainable solutions for the Oglala Lakota Nation.
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 Steve Poltz:
It might’ve even been last night, but Steve Poltz just played the greatest show of his life. Guess what?
The next show will be even greater, making that show the greatest show of his life.
Are you starting to notice a trend?
He isn’t shy about it either.
Even after most likely thousands of shows (but who’s counting?), he hits the stage with the same amount of energy and always makes sure to declare, “This is the greatest show of my life.”
It’s why he’s quietly emerged as the kind of live phenomenon celebrated passionately by a diehard fanbase worldwide and renowned as a festival favorite everywhere from Bluesfest in Byron Bay and High Sierra Music Festival in California and Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Colorado to Cayamo Cruise (where he actually got married). It’s why his music has crept into pop culture via collaborations with everyone from Jewel and Billy Strings to Molly Tuttle, Sierra Hull, Nicki Bluhm, Oliver Wood and even the late Mojo Nixon. It’s why after over a dozen albums he’s still creatively firing on all cylinders and critically acclaimed by the likes of Rolling Stone, Associated Press, Billboard and many more.
Nevertheless, the next gig will be the greatest show for him (and maybe for you too)…
“I started doing it years ago, because I feel grateful to still be alive,” he notes. “I convinced myself that every show is the greatest show I’ve ever played. They’re all different, and it depends on my mood each day, but I know I’m there to entertain people. It always cracks me up when I stumble into some sort of weird thing that’s handed to me like a gift from the freaky deadly heavens above.”
Poltz might as well be “a gift from the freaky deadly heavens above” himself. He was born in Nova Scotia—Halifax, to be exact. Somewhere along the way, he began his relationship with the guitar at six-years-old. “We’re joined at the hip and lip and it’s always near my grip,” he affirms. He grew up in Los Angeles and Palm Springs (where he “met Elvis and Liberace”) and settled in San Diego (where he cut his teeth “under the tutelage of The Beat Farmers”).
He kicked off his musical journey in San Diego-bred underground favorites The Rugburns. However, the world got to know Poltz when he co-wrote two tracks from Jewel’s diamond-certified debut Pieces Of You, including the multi-platinum Billboard Hot 100 #2 “You Were Meant For Me” (he’s also in the video). He delivered his own full-length debut One Left Shoe in 1998 and paved the way for an extensive solo catalog defined by what he calls “evocative lyrics mixed with positivity and traces of tragicomedy.”
If you so choose, you can trace his evolution from “Everything About You” (which popped up in Notting Hill) to the staple “Can O’ Pop”—christened “a fizzy delight” by Rolling Stone. The latter graced his 2022 album Stardust & Satellites.
Co-produced and created with The Wood Brothers, it garnered widespread acclaim. HOLLER. hailed it as “a wonderfully energized, often joyful and wryly provocative release from the charismatic Steve Poltz,” while No Depression dubbed it “poignant and ultimately uplifting.” Glide Magazine applauded how, “He takes chances like few others and seems to be increasingly more unconventional as he embraces Americana.”
Simultaneously, a myriad of artists continue to seek him out as a collaborator in the studio. Whether it be “Leaders” with Billy Strings or “Million Miles” with Molly Tuttle, he’s got dozens of cuts with various friends under his belt. He contributed two tunes to Deer Tick’s Emotional Contracts with frontman John J. McCauley going on to profess to Brooklyn Vegan, “Steve Poltz may be the biggest, most direct inspiration for me on this record.”
Poltz adds, “Usually when these folks and many others come over to my house in Nashville we end up with something I love. I try not to overthink it. There are no rules. It’s kind of like fishing. You don’t catch anything if you don’t throw your rod in the water. So I guess I just try to be available for inspiration, mixed with perspiration and exasperation.”
Speaking of perspiration, he regularly travels far and wide to audiences of all ages and all continents most every day.
“I travel from town to town and fool people,” he grins. “I sing them songs and tell them stories and somehow they decide to pay money to obtain some merch and witness the spectacle. Then I return a year later and fool them again.”
In the end, Poltz is probably gearing up for the greatest show of his life as you read this.
Thankfully, that will never change.
He signs off, “I’m just a weirdo, a freak, a bon vivant, a rounder, a rabble rouser, a workaholic, a people pleaser, an idiot and a grateful kid who ran away and joined the circus.”
Can we say it might just be The Greatest Show on Earth?!
About Rachel Baiman:
Common Nation of Sorrow, Rachel Baiman’s 2023 LP, was called one of “The Best Albums of the Year (So Far)” by The Boston Globe, awarded 4 stars from American Songwriter, and deemed a “tremendously and remarkable record” by The Amp. On the heels of an album release year that saw her play move than 130 shows across the globe, Rachel has made 2024 her “year of collaboration” with a series of A Side/B Side projects featuring some of her favorite songwriters including Pony Bradshaw, Caroline Spence, Nicholas Jamerson and Kaia Kater. If Common Nation of Sorrow was a novel, this year’s releases feel more like short stories, just long enough to make you want more.
Raised in Chicago, Rachel made her way to Nashville at 18 with the dream of being a professional fiddle player and has since released two solo records and an EP, alongside session and side-person work with Kacey Musgraves, Kevin Morby and Molly Tuttle, among many others. As a songwriter, she has garnered a reputation for her specific brand of political and personal lyricism, which Vice’s Noisey described as ‘Flipping off Authority one note at a time”.
In contrast with her previous work, (Watchouse’s Andrew Marlin produced her debut album, Shame), Rachel was the sole producer of Common Nation of Sorrow. After recording for twelve days in Nashville with Grammy-Award-winning engineer Sean Sullivan, Rachel traveled to Portland, OR, where she spent two weeks mixing the record with famed engineer and producer Tucker Martine (My Morning Jacket/The Decemberists/First Aid Kit). For her new collaborative singles, she turned to friend and indie-pop writer and producer Clare Reynolds, known professionally as Lollies. “One thing I learned from producing my own record is that I love producing, as long as it’s not my own parts,” she laughs. “I thought it would be great to have another kind of collaboration included in these new songs, on the production side.”
The first In Collaboration single release, “Dominoes”, with Pony Bradshaw, was the result of months of musical collaboration. “I’d been playing and singing in Bradshaw’s band some, and on his upcoming record, and we’d always talked about writing something together. So this felt like a natural progression.” The song hit 100,000 streams on Spotify in its first month, and Wide Open Country called it “a gut-wrenching tale that catalogs the tension between two people acting on their worst impulses, leading to a domino effect of fallout.”
"I've been looking for a new well of inspiration, outside of myself," Rachel told Wide Open Country in early 2024. "Every time that you work with someone you admire, there's a lot of growth that happens from being around their creative process and how they approach a song. It brings a new energy to my own work when I can find a new perspective I hadn’t seen before.”
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