Jupiter Nights: Lea Thomas // Nighttime
DOORS 7 PM / MUSIC 8PM
At the Basilica Gallery Building
108 South Front Street, Hudson, NY 12534 (right next to the main building on our campus)
JUPITER NIGHTS – Basilica Hudson’s weekly series of arts events in our Gallery Building – continues with an evening of dreamy, dynamic songwriting from Lea Thomas (Hudson Valley) and Nighttime (Hudson Valley).
**UPDATE: Unfortunately, on 11/17 Long Beard contracted Covid and has had to drop from the bill.**
Long Beard
Means To Me is the second full-length under Leslie Bear’s moniker, Long Beard, and her first since 2015’s Sleepwalker. Throughout the record, Leslie explores what constitutes a home — how it extends beyond the physicality of a roof over your head to the comfort of another person. A sense of self, stability or security.
The last four years between records mark a particularly significant and transitional time for Bear. A career move led her back to her hometown in New Jersey long after her friends and peers moved away, resulting in feelings of stasis and nostalgia that shape the album. Reflections on the past are evident in tracks like album single “Sweetheart”, in which Bear considers a past love, where they are now, and her life in relation to theirs.
MORE ABOUT LONG BEARD
Bear’s sophomore album shows a growth and maturation in sound from her debut. Co-produced with Craig Hendrix (Japanese Breakfast), the record occupies a dreamlike space that weaves between shoegaze-tinged guitars and upbeat, jangly pop. While still loyal to Leslie’s signature ethereal, melodic guitars and haunting whispered vocal delivery, the fully realized arrangements demonstrate a stunning clarity throughout the album.
The perfect amalgamation between Bear’s ambient-textured loops met with the pristine production and pop stylings of Hendrix’s playing can be heard in album standout “Snow Globe.” The combined reversal effects, seamless transitions, and heartbeat percussion are the language of Means To Me.
What Bear has created with Means To Me is not only a mirror for herself, but also a means for the listener to reflect on what home means to them. Whether Bear has defined a home for herself is left to wonder, as she leaves us with these final lines before the album crescendos into an explosive distorted instrumental and slowly fades: “driving down through our state lines while you dream, I’m thinking of a name to go by.”
Lea Thomas
“One hand on the wheel- honey can we stay so free?” The lush opener of Lea Thomas’s latest, Mirrors to the Sun, unfolds with shimmering guitar arrangements and a soft chorus of horns. Her voice is unwavering– wide-eyed yet at ease, ready to meet all that lies ahead.
Blending personal narrative with universal observations of both the mundane and mystical, Thomas “creates worlds with her words” (American Songwriter). Seamlessly shifting between focused calm and propulsive explorations, the Hawaii-born, Hudson Valley-based songwriter guides her band with intention, conjuring whispers of each season within her dynamic reflections on transformation and self-discovery.
Her songs have been called “hypnotic” and “empowering” and garnered praise from NPR’s All Songs Considered, The Guardian, and more.
Nighttime
Eva Louise Goodman’s Nighttime project locates itself on a musical tree planted on the British Isles, perched atop the branch of folk leaning into sixties rock. Her upstate New York environs don’t stray far from that image. With tempered percussion, floating mellotron, and singing that evokes Bleecker & MacDougal on a fervent Saturday afternoon, her sound reaches deep into the essence of musicians such as Vashti Bunyan, Sibylle Baier and Pentangle, breaking down the decades into a sound thoroughly and bizarrely modern.
“Nighttime makes the kind of cosmic folk songwriting that can lower the temperature of a room.” — Clash Magazine