***SPECIAL SHOW****
Doors 4:00pm • Music 8:00pm

DAVID WAX MUSEUM

with special guest Anthony da Costa

Live at Abilene Bar and Lounge

"Suz and I started this band as friends," says David Wax, "but now we’re married and have a child and have our family on the road with us. The stakes are different."

The roots of David Wax Museum stretch back nearly a decade, and all the way from New England to Mexico. As a student at Harvard, Wax began traveling south of the border to study and immerse himself in the country's traditional music and culture. Back in Boston, he met fiddler/singer Suz Slezak, whose love of traditional American and Irish folk music fused with Wax's Mexo-Americana into a singular, energetic blend that captivated audiences and critics alike. Their 2010 breakout performance at the Newport Folk Festival made them the most talked-about band of the weekend, with NPR hailing them as "pure, irresistible joy." They released a trio of albums that earned escalating raves everywhere from SPIN and Entertainment Weekly (who described them as sounding "like Andrew Bird with a Mexican folk bent") to the New York Times and The Guardian (which dubbed the music "global crossover at its best"). They earned an invitation to return to Newport, this time on the main stage, as well as dates supporting The Avett Brothers, The Carolina Chocolate Drops, Buena Vista Social Club, and more.

It was on the road over these past few years as the band and audiences grew, though, that Wax could feel their exuberant live show evolving beyond its formative roots.

"I felt empowered to start the band because of my time in Mexico studying folk music," Wax explains. "In Boston, the term 'Americana' or 'folk' was just this catchall to describe what everyone was doing. It was helpful to use that to talk about our music at first, but we've found that our hearts feel most shaken, and the band fires on all cylinders, when we're putting on a rock show. What we've tried to retain about our folk origins is the warm sound of people playing acoustic instruments together in a room.

David Wax Museum's latest album, Line of Light, will be released on August 23.

"David Wax Museum, the duo of David Wax and Suz Slezak, announced their seventh studio album Line of Light was released on August 23 via Nine Mile Records. The album was produced by Carl Broemel of My Morning Jacket and was the first full length album he produced in his newly built recording studio in his home of Nashville, TN."

Line of Light marks the band's return for their first full-length album in four years. It finds the duo tackling subjects both political and personal in a way they haven't explored in the studio before. With Broemel taking the band's folk-pop underpinnings and outfitting them with serious sonic force, the songs push deeper into themes of interconnectedness, spiritual longing, and deep personal reflection. Being artists from Charlottesville, VA, where they raise their two children, they found themselves responding to the political milieu we all find ourselves in at this moment. While not necessarily sunny, the collection shares a firm optimism in the human condition: there's light beyond the darkness.d to make a record that leaned more heavily on us as a duo. We loved being in the studio with Carl Broemel that first time to record “Big Sur”, feeling like the process was so collaborative and the atmosphere so warm. We felt the resulting song was authentic in a new way, less dressed up with studio tricks and more about how our voices and instruments blend and live together.

Anthony da Costa’s songs don’t extend metaphors or spin yarns. They shoot straight. The singer-songwriter and guitarist speaks plainly, from the heart and the gut. With his latest work, including his recent solo album DA COSTA, he adds the musical force of some of American folk and roots’ seminal cities to his forthright style. “In the past few years, since I moved from New York to Austin and then to Nashville, I’ve found my voice as a songwriter,” muses da Costa. “I’ve honed my band, made strong musical friendships. I felt like I started over and found what I needed to say.” You can hear it clearly in his songs, whether they are steeped in rock-country grit or frank folk. “I feel I’m just getting my own music off the ground, though I’ve been playing it for 13 years,” da Costa muses. “But everything I’ve done has contributed to my knowledge. It was the prelude, and now I know singing and writing my songs is most important to me.”

https://www.davidwaxmuseum.com/
http://www.anthonydacosta.com/

Tickets: $27 and on sale now at Abilene Bar and Lounge and online at https://abilene.showare.com/