Chastity Brown 

Saturday, April 22, 2023

As the daughter of a blues musician, Chastity Brown was born with an innate ability to channel wrenching circumstances into beautiful, uplifting songs. But after surviving the isolation of the early pandemic and a global racial reckoning that was set off mere blocks from her South Minneapolis home, even she was surprised to hear the way her latest album was taking shape.

“It’s a love album, in a way I didn’t plan on,” Chastity says. The songs on Sing to the Walls blossom around the ears like a lush garden of flowers, with Chastity’s expressive voice and expansive melodies supported by intertwining, twinkling tendrils of atmospheric sounds. Even the titles hint at the album’s sense of optimistic yearning, from the dreamy opening track “Wonderment” to her ode to healing a broken heart post-breakup, “Curiosity,” to the pulsing promise of “Hope.”

In the same way, her lyrics seek to reach across the great divide. “I will sing to those walls, hope it gets through / And I will sing to your scars, they need healing too,” Chastity sings on the album’s title track, a pandemic love song about breaking through all of the physical, emotional, and social barriers that have been constructed around all of us in recent years. By the next track, “Like the Sun,” she breaks through into a melody that rises like a wide-open prairie sunrise—a heart-rending moment that demonstrates her talent for expressing big, beautiful ideas in her music, and to create songs that radiate bliss.

Standard: $35  Economy: $25 

Members: $30/$20

Larry McCray 

Saturday, May 13, 2023

Rust belt blues shouter and guitar slinger Larry McCray was born in 1960 in Magnolia, Ark., about 12 miles from the Louisiana line. He spent his early years on a farm as the second youngest of nine siblings. After trying his hand at saxophone in school, his older (and only) sister, Clara, introduced Larry to the guitar and the transformative music of the three Kings of the blues (B.B., Freddie and Albert).

By the late ’80s, Larry had attracted the attention of Virgin Records executive John Wooler, who had recently started a subsidiary label, Point Blank Records, featuring blues, soul and Americana artists. He signed Larry McCray as his first artist. Larry’s debut album, Ambition—aptly named as it fused elements of blues, rock, and soul to create a contemporary blues sound—was recorded in a friend’s Detroit basement studio and released in 1990 to critical acclaim.

Over the past three decades of nonstop touring and recording, Larry has played and shared the stage with such blues greats as BB King, Buddy Guy, Albert King, John Mayall, Johnny Winter, Robert Cray, Keb Mo, Jimmie Vaughan, Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Joe Bonamassa, as well as rock legends the Allman Brothers, Phil Lesh, Jonny Lang, Joe Walsh, Levon Helm, Chris Robinson, Dickey Betts, and countless others.

In 2021, Blues Without You, Larry’s latest, a 12-track release was recorded on famed blues rock guitarist Bonamassa’s Keeping the Blues Alive nonprofit label with producer Josh Smith, a partnership that has also spawned a video (for the upcoming single, “Arkansas”) and a documentary.

Standard: $45  Economy: $35  

Members: $40/$30