Slaid Cleaves Album Release Show
Fri Mar 24, 6:30 PM - Fri Mar 24, 10:30 PM

Americana/folk stalwart Slaid Cleaves has been putting out highly acclaimed records for 25 years now, consistently delivering songs that strike people's hearts and become part of their lives. Together Through the Dark is no different. Producer Scrappy Jud Newcomb and Cleaves teamed up for the third time in early 2022 between Covid surges to record a new batch of songs, Slaid's first in five years. Familiar themes of struggle and resilience will be a surprise to no one. As Scrappy puts it, “This album speaks to the hopeful, the hard working, the battered, confused, and the sad. But above all to the believers in the city of freedom that we heard in the stories of our youth and all those FM radio hits.” Watch for single releases to radio and streaming services starting in the fall in anticipation of an early 2023 release on CD and vinyl.

Joseph Hudak of Rolling Stone calls Cleaves “a master storyteller, one influenced not by the shine of pop-culture but by the dirt of real life.”

The music of Texas-based singer/songwriter Slaid Cleaves is rooted in traditional country and folk forms, but is distinct enough to have held interest amidst a sea of singer/songwriters since the 1990s. While he released a handful of recordings during the early '90s, he gained significant notice with No Angel Knows, which was released on Rounder's Philo subsidiary in 1997. Joined by former Lucinda Williams guitarist and producer Gurf Morlix, Cleaves combined his interest in folk songs, early rock and roll, and traditional country music into an amalgamation of styles becoming known at that time as Americana. Not surprisingly, the album rode high into the charts at Americana-formatted radio stations across the U.S. and Canada that year and set the tone for the rest of his career.

In his hometown of South Berwick, Maine, Cleaves began playing keyboards in garage bands while still in high school. His first band, founded in 1980 by childhood friend Rod Picott, was dubbed The Magic Rats. After the lead singer was kicked out of his next band, The Classifieds, Cleaves started singing cover songs behind his Hammond Porta-B organ in local road houses, hotel lounges and bowling alleys while still in his teens. After reading in Rolling Stone about Bruce Springsteen's inspirations for the Nebraska album, he climbed into his parents' attic to rediscover the treasure trove of albums which he recalled hearing as a child – Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry - and which became guides to the budding songwriter. While in college, where he studied English and philosophy, he learned a few guitar chords and spent a school year in Ireland, where he began to write and sing his own songs and joined the league of buskers on the streets of Cork.

After a few post-college years in Portland, Maine, fronting the alt-country band, The Moxie Men, Cleaves and future wife and business partner Karen set out on a career adventure, moving to Austin in late 1991. Despite the echelon of acclaimed singer-songwriters like Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Lucinda Williams, Robert Earl Keen, Butch Hancock, and Joe Ely, all centered around the Austin scene at the time, Cleaves was eventually able to make a name for himself there. In 1996, he began his collaboration with Morlix, who liked Cleaves' homemade demo tape and ended up serving as producer for five albums, starting with 1997's No Angel Knows.

During the following decade Cleaves began touring relentlessly throughout North America, the UK, and the Netherlands, while releasing three more acclaimed albums, starting with the career-defining Broke Down in 2000, followed by Wishbones (2004) and then a collection of covers of friends' songs, Unsung (2006). With an eclectic, bare-bones combo he was well received at major folk festivals including, Newport Folk Festival, Cambridge Folk Festival, Strawberry Music Festival, and Kerrville Folk Festival (where he had been a “New Folk” winner in 1992).

After signing with Jimmy LaFave's Music Road Records, he issued Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away (2009, featuring liner notes from fan Stephen King), the two-disc Sorrow & Smoke: Live at the Horseshoe Lounge (2011), and Still Fighting the War (2013), produced by beloved Austin guitarist Scrappy Jud Newcomb. The title song was inspired in part by Craig F. Walker's Pulitzer-winning photo-essay depicting a Marine's harrowing return to civilian life. The album was praised as "one of the year's best albums" by American Songwriter and "carefully crafted, . . . songs about the struggles of the heart in hard times" by the Wall Street Journal. The New York Daily News called his music "a treasure hidden in plain sight," while the Austin Chronicle declared, "there are few contemporaries that compare. He's become a master craftsman on the order of Guy Clark and John Prine."

2017's Ghost on the Car Radio, on his own Candy House Media label, found Cleaves teaming up with Mr. Newcomb for a second time to present an album of vivid snapshots of regular folks dreaming, loving, scraping by and getting old in small town America.
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Raised outside Houston by first-generation Korean immigrant parents, BettySoo grew up listening to the Great American songbook and country radio. Older sisters led her to the world of singer/songwriters, and nights spent at The Cactus Café and Hole In The Wall turned her on to the legacy of Texas song.

Her 2007 solo disc, Little Tiny Secrets, garnered heavy regional airplay; 2009’s Heat Sin Water Sin produced by Gurf Morlix (Lucinda Williams, Ray Wylie Hubbard), provided building blocks to a national (and international) audience. In 2014, When We’re Gone, co-produced with cellist Brian Standefer (Alejandro Escovedo, Terry Allen) placed her firmly in the first rank of songwriters working today.

She’s won the requisite awards: Kerrville NewFolk, Big Top Chautauqua Songwriter of the Year, Dave Carter Songwriting Award at Sisters Folk Festival, Mountain Stage NewSong Competition. She’s played the festivals: multiple SXSW’s, Kerrville, Calgary, and more. And the radio shows: E-Town, Mountain Stage, WoodSongs, BBC 2 with Bob Harris.

Until the virus shutdown, BettySoo was touring nonstop, both as a solo artist and with Nobody's Girl. Intelligent lyrics and tightly-woven harmonies keep audiences entranced, and you’d have seen her onstage singing harmonies at CD release shows for artists such as Eliza Gilkyson, or on the road with Bonnie Whitmore in support of James McMurtry’s national tours.

In the Time of COVID-19, BettySoo can be found cutting a unique path through the broad streaming landscape -- and as with everything she does, she has approached it in a way that invites authentic connection, encourages compassion, and merits listening.