One week before the winter solstice, the weather is nasty in Charlottesville and it’s cold as fuck inside Magnolia House. The four members of hardcore punk band Fried Egg—guitarist Tyler Abernethy, bassist Sam Richardson, drummer Sam Roberts, and vocalist Erik Tsow—sit on mismatched couches and chairs in the dim living room of the DIY venue […]
It’s time for us to take up the sticks and beat this drum again. Here’s our never-complete (but still pretty comprehensive) look at what Charlottesville-area artists released this year. We’ve focused mainly on albums and EPs, but there are dozens of other bands and artists releasing single after single, or playing songs that haven’t been […]
Nick Evans sometimes wakes at “god-awful hours of the night” to find his brother, Will, in the living room, sitting quietly amid microphones, coiled cables, amps, guitars, and drums, his shoulders hunched toward his computer, the blue-white glow of the screen illuminating his face, laser-focused, with headphones covering his ears. Nick laughs as he describes […]
As Charlottesville’s character has broadened, so has its classical music scene, which is now largely driven by community efforts to build the culture. When Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach began transforming the sounds we were used to hearing, 250 years ago, people said it was the death of classical [...]
It’s a rainy Friday in late October, the first cold night of fall, and the people who’ve dared to venture outside tiptoe quickly around autumn leaves sticking slick on the Downtown Mall bricks. A few stories above, it’s warm and cozy inside the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, where a small crowd has [...]
“I’m a pretty sentimental guy,” says Andrew Neil Maternick as he settles in to a rust-colored tweed recliner that belonged to his grandmother. With a gentle hand and a look of delight on his broad face, he lifts up the woolly fabric of the armrest to show off the retro design of the chair’s [...]
Nathaniel Star gets most of his ideas in the shower. It’s where he ruminates on a beat, hums melodies, and devises lyrics. When he knows he has something good, he’ll hop out of the shower, wrap himself in a towel and dash, water dripping all over the floor, into his studio to record it. “I’ll [...]
Between sips of seltzer and small handfuls of Chex Mix, Juliana Daugherty lovingly runs her hand along her cat Monday’s back. “I’m still kind of shocked that I managed to get it out in the world,” she says, eyeing a thick cardboard box at the bottom of a bookshelf. It’s full of vinyl copies of [...]
When a band’s music is described as genre-defying, it often means its musicians are struggling to find a successful sound. In the case of Adar, the local singer-songwriter does transcend genres and her songs successfully incorporate several types of music—funk, rock, and jazz—to create a [...]
Many associate Will Marsh’s band Gold Connections with Car Seat Headrest thanks to several collaborations, but Marsh’s group stands solidly on its own. After a label switch, the long-awaited release of Popular Fiction arrived in 2018, marking an impressive step forward. The album shows off the [...]
When you’re an independent musician in a competitive town like Charlottesville, it’s never too soon to get started. Jacob Lourie’s musical career began during his senior year at St. Anne’s-Belfield School. This month heralds his first full-length release, Sad Boi Bops Vol. 1, and it promises to [...]
Nay Nichelle likes to write outside. There’s something inspirational about natural sunlight, she says, especially at sunrise and sunset, when the light changes quickly and just so. It’s hard to put the reason for the inspiration into words, she says, but those moments often lead to lyrics for [...]
Overcoming injuries, battling “drinking issues” and months at a time on the road would change, possibly derail, most bands. But Sons of Bill put its collective heart on its sleeve and used these challenges to craft its newest album, Oh God Ma’am. Released in June, the record shows an increased [...]
Rob Cheatham is an ideal modern country artist—his twang echoes the sounds that currently dominate the genre, while his lyrics harken to the storytelling abilities of forebears like Willie Nelson or Merle Haggard and cover topics such as love, be it unrequited or shared, and hard drinking as a [...]
Though Will Thomas Reed is currently based in Nashville, where he’s paying his dues in the country music scene, his heart is here in his hometown of Charlottesville. For the release of his latest EP, To Whom It May Concern, Reed returns to celebrate with a release party and will surely bust out [...]
On his first day of college, Wes Swing rented a cello. There was something about the instrument that called to him. Perhaps it was the vocal quality, its aural proximity to the human voice; perhaps it was the instrument’s ability to express a particularly full range of emotion, with its deep, [...]
Last April, A’nija Johnson walked into the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center auditorium ready to speak her truth at the Nine Pillars Hip Hop Cultural Fest’s freshman class competition. Wearing a floor-length skirt, a Tasmanian Devil “I need coffee” T-shirt and a pair of [...]
Unranked and surely incomplete, here’s an alphabetical list of what Charlottesville-area artists released this year. It’s longer than last year’s, and based on interviews and conversations with many of these artists, I suspect it’s because the past year hangs heavy in our hearts. And so, we [...]
Climbing into your mom’s minivan when you’d lied only slightly about your whereabouts for the evening, reeking of cigarettes and blaming it on your friends when it really was you who was smoking. Claiming you’d only been drinking Pepsi and then trying to figure out how to throw away the beer [...]
It’s a gray Sunday evening, 50-something degrees and drizzling when The Beetnix step onto the outdoor stage at IX Art Park. It’s been raining all day, but a crowd of more than 100 has gathered on the graffiti-painted concrete ground in front of the stage. Many of them hold their phones and [...]
When Chris Dammann was a kid growing up in Charlottesville, he spent a lot of time looking at his dad’s upright bass. “I wonder what that does, to be in that corner,” Dammann recalls thinking about the instrument. He decided to find out for himself at age 14, when he took the bass out of […]
Before Maxx Katz plays a single note of a FLOOM set, she looks out at the audience in front of her and thinks: “We’re all going to die.” That thought in mind, she rings out one heavy chord on her silver sparkle Epiphone Les Paul and lets it tumble out of her bitchin’ amps and […]