TJ Douglas / Katy Pinke / Will Stratton

Thursday, Feb. 27, 8-10:30pm

$12 advance / $15 door
Get Tickets HERE

The Avalon Lounge
29 Church St
Catskill, NY

TJ Douglas‘ 2024 album, Dying, reflects on the emotional and existential landscape of their work as a palliative care hospital chaplain, creating a love-and-grief-filled exploration of life and mortality.

TJ is prolific, and their many albums – Joey, Our Lady Star of the Sea, Help and Protect Us, Lo, and now Dying – showcase their evolution as a writer and musician. Their poetic approach and distinctive sound have earned them a dedicated following.

Katy Pinke’s songs are self-examinations—cerebral and unsparing, but reaching toward a more promising future. The Manhattan-based singer-songwriter, painter and actor mixes the precise and wry delivery of The Roches and Connie Converse with the idiosyncratic songforms of her espoused hero Bill Callahan. The songs on her self-titled debut album possess a direct and inviting quality, but within each, a quiet battle is being waged in an ongoing struggle to, as Pinke puts it, “unconditionally love a fragmented self.”

The album strips Pinke’s art down to its absolute essence. At the home studio of Phil Weinrobe (Adrianne Lenker, Cass McCombs), she recorded her vocals and minimal guitar accompaniments live with drummer Jeremy Gustin in front of an audience of a few friends. The idea was to capture the energy of Pinke’s live shows—storied events in the NYC indie rock scene. (Artists she has shared the stage with include Laura Veirs, Jolie Holland, TV On the Radio’s Kyp Malone, and Indigo Sparke.)

The record’s most devastating moments are sometimes also its most fun (“Tomato,” “One Coin”). Elsewhere, there are bittersweet moments of effortless beauty (“Grapefruit,” “Strawman”). In Pinke’s music, life sometimes feels like a series of pushes into a vast, hopeful unknown, and the time spent conserving our energy in between them. All we can do, she hypothesizes, is try to stay in tune with ourselves while waiting for the next opportunity to try again.
https://katypinke.bandcamp.com/

Will Stratton (b. 1987, Woodland, California) is an American songwriter living in New York’s Hudson Valley. His eighth album, Points of Origin, comes out March 7th on Ruination Records (USA) and Bella Union (worldwide). His previous albums, 2021’s The Changing Wilderness and 2017’s Rosewood Almanac, received critical acclaim from Sir Elton John and Alexis Petridis (The Guardian), as well as journalists at Pitchfork, Mojo, and Uncut, among others. He also mixes and produces music at Roxaboxen Recording, the small studio he co-owns and operates with Martin Courtney in Beacon NY, and he has written about music and recording for Tape Op and Brooklyn Magazine. 
https://willstratton.bandcamp.com/album/points-of-origin-2