A. Savage
Rickshaw Stop
∙
San Francisco
Saturday, April 13 at 8 pm PDT
Serves Food
Outdoor Patio
Concert Venue
Bar
Saturday, April 13 at 8 pm PDT
Serves Food
Outdoor Patio
Concert Venue
Bar
Entry Options
Details
Description
Saturday, April 13
A. SAVAGE
Mali Velasquez
8 pm doors
$20/22
all ages
“I imagine myself playing these songs in a small club that is slowly burning,” says A. Savage of his second solo record, Several Songs about Fire. Born in 1986 in Denton, Texas and raised around the newspaper where his parents both worked, by 2012 A. Savage became a headline of his own as the co-frontman of Parquet Courts. After more than a decade in New York, Savage has left the city and the United States, marking his exit with a masterpiece of maturity and a worthy corollary to his first solo venture, 2017’s Thawing Dawn. “Fire is something you have to escape from, and in a way this album is about escaping from something. This album is a burning building, and these songs are things I’d leave behind to save myself.”
The songs themselves were marked by constraint even as Savage drafted them, sculpted in part in the bucolic, nocturnal hush of rural England, where he and Jack Cooper (Modern Nature, Ultimate Painting) worked deep into night trying not to wake Cooper’s sleeping daughter. “Every song had to be able to be stripped down to just an acoustic guitar,” says Savage. “If you can distill a song into a single instrument, it's much easier to understand it.” The intimacy of these tracks are refracted by the presence of some of his closest friends, among them Cate Le Bon, who listened to Savage at work on what would become the album during a US tour in 2022. “It was really special to see them come into existence and to then be in the studio working on them with him,” explains Le Bon of working toward his vision, rather than within a band. “The beautiful friction of shoulder to shoulder was replaced by something else.”
In its recording, too, the album became as urgent and intuitive as a response to disaster. Produced by John Parish on a 1” 16-track in just ten days in Bristol, studded by the support of Cooper and Le Bon as well as saxophonist Euan Hinshelwood (Cate Le Bon), drummer Dylan Hadley (Kamikaze Palm Tree,White Fence), and violinist Magdalena McLean (Caroline), the album is a devotional study in tradition—and something all Savage’s own. https://a-savage.com/
When Nashville-based singer-songwriter Mali Velasquez traded her Texas panhandle home for the verdant foothills of Tennessee, she did so with a newfound perspective that mirrored her environment, culminating in the lushly raw edge of her folk-rooted indie rock. Wistfully openhearted and incisive, Velasquez tips the fulcrum between reflection and remedy with melody-forward unction and lyrical tenderness. Her forthcoming debut, I’m Green, is a perennial introspection into the wild animal of young adulthood and the renewing realization that the person we’re most often seeking permission from, crucially, is ourselves. https://malivelasquez.bandcamp.com/