Maneka | Field Mouse with Silver Spring @ Songbyrd 8:30 PM, 9.10.19

Maneka | Field Mouse

MANEKA | FIELD MOUSE
WITH SPRING SILVER

SONGBYRD PRESENTS
UPSTAIRS, ALL AGES


DOORS: 8:30 PM // SHOW: 9:00 PM
Free ($10 Suggested Donation)
FREE RSVP
Songbyrd Vinyl Lounge 
Tuesday September 10, 2019

Maneka’s debut LP is a release that attempts to encapsulate the experience of one of the more distinct and multifaceted performers currently making guitar music. That experience is a deep and varied one, and one that is influenced by McKnight’s unique cultural background in a number of ways. Raised in the DC area to a black father and a mother of Chinese and Pakistani descent, McKnight first fell in love with rap and hip hop in his early teens, but was influenced by his older brother, a fan of early ‘90s rock bands like Sonic Youth and Nirvana, and his father’s passion for jazz guitar playing, which McKnight went on to study at Berklee School of Music in Boston. His interests have remained omnivorous, but throughout his life and musical career McKnight has felt as though his musical interests have been consistently policed along racial lines.
“If you’re into rock music and you’re black then people on all sides will say you’re trying to be white or you talk white,” McKnight says. “What does that even mean? That will take over your identity in a big way. Suddenly just because I’m interested in something else that erases all of the other stuff that I’m into. It’s an uncomfortable thing that I shouldn’t have to deal with but that I deal with any way. I’m here and I listen to some music that some white people listen to but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know who I am, or that I’ve erased this other part of me.”
Devin, which nods to genres as varied as grindcore, jazz, shoegaze, hip hop, new wave and post-punk (sometimes within a single song), is in a sense his response, a celebration of McKnight’s identity as a musician and a person and an exercise in what McKnight describes as “claiming a different voice.” Thematically the album digs deep into the corresponding territory of McKnight’s experience as a musician and a person of color in America, exploring a perspective that is rarely represented in indie rock. McKnight characterizes the LP as a “confrontational” album about “black pride and addressing my confusion as a minority in white indie rock scenes,” which is manifested in a variety of ways. The alien punk of “My Queen,” which features McKnight’s Speedy Ortiz bandmate Sadie Dupuis, imagines the relationship between King Tut and Nefertiti, who McKnight describes as “the worlds greatest black Power couple before the Obamas.” “Mixer” addresses McKnight’s sometimes confusing experience of exploring his identity as a mixed race man in a society that constantly interrogates him about his background, while the almost Pavement-esque “Holy Hell” was inspired by McKnight’s move into a new apartment building in a gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn, and examines McKnight’s experience as a “gentrifying person” in contrast to the neighborhood’s other residents (“a lot of people set their shit down in the middle of Bed Stuy and are just like ‘this is where I live now,’ but for me it’s a little more complicated” he says). According to McKnight, his embrace of this thematic direction is reflective of the lessons learned over the course of his career so far, particularly the experience of being in a band with the profile of Speedy Ortiz.
“I kept hearing more and more about how me being in Speedy Ortiz effected a lot of people of color just by being a guy up there who looks different than most everybody else doing it, and that really inspired me,” McKnight says. “Rock is such a murky area for a lot of people of colour, especially black people. In a lot of ways I think black people resent rock music because of its appropriative qualities and the feeling of not being welcome. There’s no one else like you being represented. When I see more black and brown faces in the crowd and that makes me feel a lot better about what I’m doing and that I can actually speak to that experience. I’m not making art for art’s sake any more. I have to talk about my identity and my experience or I feel like I’m short changing people. I’m no longer ashamed or afraid to talk openly about difference and how that has either held me back or how that’s misinformed my self image in the past.”
McKnight’s time in the music scene has influenced the album in other ways, perhaps most significantly by introducing him to the community of musicians that he now turns to for inspiration and council. It features contributions from several people in that community including longtime Maneka drummer and vocalist Jordan Blakely, producer Mike Thomas of Grass Is Green, members of Stove, Ovlov, Speedy Ortiz and Two Inch Astronaut, and McKnight’s cousin, the award winning saxophonist Brent Birkhead. The track “Positive” functions as a kind of song of encouragement to his fellow musicians, many of whom struggle with mental health issues, and McKnight’s writing process for the album was partly born from his friendship with (Sandy) Alex G, which blossomed during time they spent on tour together.
The results are consistently engaging, surprising and something that could only have been produced by McKnight. From the album’s metal-inspired opening – a track (named in homage to the trick plays run when McKnight was a high school football player) on which he demonically recites a recipe for chitlins as a way of re-appropriating the use of the devil in metal music to dramatize the ways the legacies of slavery still effect the black community today – to the intimate closing track “Style,” a soundscape that incorporates a recording of his parents talking about him (“you’ve got your own style, Devin,” his mother says. ”…it’s different, it’s not the same as every person…we have to embrace that”), the album is an incredibly personal document that succeeds in communicating, with depth, clarity, humor and emotional directness, the experiences that have made Devin McKnight who he is.
“Jumping around between genres and styles and claiming a different kind of voice, taking these liberties, I was uncomfortable about that,” says McKnight. “A friend of mine convinced me that being able to show those different sides and take on those different voices is a good thing, he convinced me that I should celebrate that. He said ‘that’s the beauty of being you. The beauty of being you is that you don’t fit the package.’”
 

Field Mouse 
 
Rachel and Andrew formed Field Mouse sometime in 2009 after meeting at SUNY Purchase. After releasing two 7″ singles, they signed to Topshelf Records and released their first full length Hold Still Life (2014) followed by Episodic (2016). Their new album, Meaning, comes out August 16th, 2019

 

MUSIC VENUE

Our venue — lovingly referred to as “THE BYRD CAGE “ — is the new premier space to experience live music in Adams Morgan. Featuring a state of the art sound system designed by Audioism and a funky basement vibe, it has a standing room capacity of 200+ and a seated capacity of up to 100. The venue hosts international, national and local artists, from live performers to DJs, as well as other live performance art forms.

RESTAURANT AND BAR

Located at 2477 18th Street NW, the SONGBYRD MUSIC HOUSE features a full menu and bar ideal for soaking in DC sounds and flavors with your squad.

Our seasonal food and drink menus cycle to best fit the moods both outside and inside, and the cozy decor makes this Music House the newest destination in Adams Morgan to nod your head, and more. Come by to listen to a DJ spin upstairs in the bar, grab a bite, then head on downstairs the the Music Venue a.k.a The Byrd Cage to listen to a live show, some comedy or to dance. 

WEEKDAY HAPPY HOUR 5-7 pm : $2 off all tap, $5 all rail, $8 quesadilla (no takeout)

Saturday 5-7 pm- $8 Hot Dogs (no takeout) 

Sunday 5-10 pm- 1/2 burgers (veggie, turkey, and classic beef) (no takeout)

REVERSE HAPPY HOUR every Friday and Saturday starting at 11 pm $5 taps, $4 Coronas and other specials

Luke Temple with Meernaa @ Songbyrd 7 PM, 9.10.19

Luke Temple with Meernaa

SONGBYRD PRESENTS
DOWNSTAIRS, ALL AGES


DOORS: 7:00 PM // SHOW: 8:00 PM

$12 / $15
BUY TICKETS
ON SALE NOW!
 
Songbyrd Presents
Tuesday September 10, 2019
 
I want to call Luke Temple a disciple of Hank Williams and Roger Miller. I want to call him an avant-garde traditionalist. I want to say he’s got an unmatched intuition for the askew. I want to say his only real contemporary peer is another master songsmith named Cass McCombs. I could make a pretty infallible case for any of these statements. But at the end of the day, it’d be adding too many bells and whistles to what his new album is. At its core, it’s one of the year’s most stunning folk records. You should just let Temple’s high-and-lonesome salve of a voice raise your goose-pimples from their dormancy. You should let his insightful, devastating lyrics make tiny, tender tears in your soul.
A Hand Through the Cellar Door is, in many ways, Temple’s most straightforward collection of song-storying tunes to date. There are tales of dysfunctional, broken homes and of dysfunctional, broken people. “Birds of Late December,” with its fluttering, nimble fingerpicking, paints an exacting but impressionistic portrait of divorce through the eyes of an exceptionally wistful child. In both “Maryanne Was Quiet” and “The Case of Louis Warren” we follow two characters whose lives unravel in very different ways, though their central question is the same: After you shed all the things you think make you who you are, what is left? Temple is creating small, confident stories with a massive scope – like a good Alice Munroe story. Album standout “The Complicated Men of the 1940s” is a thought experiment concerning the sacrifice of a passing generation, where the heroes of yesterday seem like the stuffy, old guard to a new generation that’s grown just a bit too entitled to their comfort.
But this being Temple and all – the creative mind behind Here We Go Magic – nothing is really ever so straightforward. The arrangements, kept to a minimal drums/guitar/bass/string set-up here, expand and contract in unexpected ways.Temple writes with the eye of a painter like Eric Fischl. Whereas Fischl will put a subtle provocative image in the margins of a piece to create a feeling of imbalance, Temple will add a guitar hiccup or a just-behind-the-beat string section to create a sensation of everything being slightly off. And in that imbalance, both artists show us grace. Yes, while the tales Temple weaves are bleak, the aura of hope never quite fades from the picture. He turns the tragedies of human folly into a celebration of our eccentricities.


On their first full-length release, Heart Hunger, Oakland-based Meernaa–Carly Bond (vocals, guitar), Rob Shelton (keys), Doug Stuart (bass), and Andrew Maguire (drums, percussion)– plumbs the depths of indigo waters. Celestial and soulful, Meernaa’s songs manage to remain grounded in the natural world. Native Cat Recordings will release their highly-anticipated album on 6/14/2019. These songs are reckonings; they are revelations of secrets; they are lonesome wanderings. They are portraits of emotional evolution, rich illustrations of painful pasts and hopeful futures.

Meernaa’s first EP, Strange Life, took them across the country on West- and East-coast tours. Between these runs, the band convened in the studio to build Heart Hunger. Bond had spent much of the prior year writing the skeletons of these songs in isolation, both in her adopted hometown of Oakland, and in the wilds of Big Sur. “Oakland is a place that inspires a lot of extroverted energy and observation of how other people live and survive,” Bond says. “And at times it’s really beautiful and other times it’s really ugly. And Big Sur is more this neutral and natural space. A place of reflection and rest.” In the studio, Shelton, Stuart, and Maguire composed their own parts, refining Bond’s raw materials. They worked closely with engineers James Riotto and Jacob Winik to add layers of color and texture. The resulting 11 songs are at once intricate and immediate, joyous and full of ache.
 
Meernaa’s body of work is “a master class in synth wizardry that manages to bow before the throne of analog gear geekdom without ever sounding fussed over, or getting bogged down in its own minutiae,” says Max Savage Levenson on Not Dead Yet: Bay Area. Of Bond’s songwriting, Amelia Maher of The Line of Best Fit says, “you will find that Meernaa’s head honcho’s imagination is as intriguing as it is beguiling and mysterious.”

MUSIC VENUE

Our venue — lovingly referred to as “THE BYRD CAGE “ — is the new premier space to experience live music in Adams Morgan. Featuring a state of the art sound system designed by Audioism and a funky basement vibe, it has a standing room capacity of 200+ and a seated capacity of up to 100. The venue hosts international, national and local artists, from live performers to DJs, as well as other live performance art forms.

RESTAURANT AND BAR

Located at 2477 18th Street NW, the SONGBYRD MUSIC HOUSE features a full menu and bar ideal for soaking in DC sounds and flavors with your squad.

Our seasonal food and drink menus cycle to best fit the moods both outside and inside, and the cozy decor makes this Music House the newest destination in Adams Morgan to nod your head, and more. Come by to listen to a DJ spin upstairs in the bar, grab a bite, then head on downstairs the the Music Venue a.k.a The Byrd Cage to listen to a live show, some comedy or to dance. 

WEEKDAY HAPPY HOUR 5-7 pm : $2 off all tap, $5 all rail, $8 quesadilla (no takeout)

Saturday 5-7 pm- $8 Hot Dogs (no takeout) 

Sunday 5-10 pm- 1/2 burgers (veggie, turkey, and classic beef) (no takeout)

REVERSE HAPPY HOUR every Friday and Saturday starting at 11 pm $5 taps, $4 Coronas and other specials

Quinn Christopherson with Angelica Garcia (Solo Set) @ Songbyrd 7 PM, 9.9.19

QUINN CHRISTOPHERSON WITH ANGELICA GARCIA (SOLO SET).

SONGBYRD PRESENTS
DOWNSTAIRS, ALL AGES

DOORS: 7:00 PM // SHOW: 8:00 PM

$15
BUY TICKETS

ON SALE NOW!

Songbyrd Presents

Monday September 9, 2019

 

Quinn Christopherson is an Athabaskan and Inupiaq songwriter who was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. Quinn addresses his childhood and his role as a transgender individual navigating Alaska’s social landscape through his music.

MUSIC VENUE

Our venue — lovingly referred to as “THE BYRD CAGE “ — is the new premier space to experience live music in Adams Morgan. Featuring a state of the art sound system designed by Audioism and a funky basement vibe, it has a standing room capacity of 200+ and a seated capacity of up to 100. The venue hosts international, national and local artists, from live performers to DJs, as well as other live performance art forms.

RESTAURANT AND BAR

Located at 2477 18th Street NW, the SONGBYRD MUSIC HOUSE features a full menu and bar ideal for soaking in DC sounds and flavors with your squad.

Our seasonal food and drink menus cycle to best fit the moods both outside and inside, and the cozy decor makes this Music House the newest destination in Adams Morgan to nod your head, and more. Come by to listen to a DJ spin upstairs in the bar, grab a bite, then head on downstairs the the Music Venue a.k.a The Byrd Cage to listen to a live show, some comedy or to dance. 

WEEKDAY HAPPY HOUR 5-7 pm : $2 off all tap, $5 all rail, $8 quesadilla (no takeout)

Saturday 5-7 pm- $8 Hot Dogs (no takeout) 

Sunday 5-10 pm- 1/2 burgers (veggie, turkey, and classic beef) (no takeout)

REVERSE HAPPY HOUR every Friday and Saturday starting at 11 pm $5 taps, $4 Coronas and other specials