eTown heads on the road to Bentonville, Arkansas to visit the premier Art and Events venue, The Momentary. Joining Nick, Helen, and The eTones on stage are musical guests, Calexico and S.G. Goodman.
Veterans of the Tucson, Arizona scene, Calexico blends Indie-rock, Americana, and Tejano flavors into a unique brand of musical stew. A relative newcomer from Kentucky, S.G. Goodman performs heartfelt Country-tinged Rock and Folk songs that will give you the feels.
Nick also sits down with Kenny Williams from Pedal It Forward, a Northwest Arkansas non-profit that focuses on getting bicycles to people who need them.
Calexico
About Calexico:
r part of the past three decades exploring the dusty musical borderlands of the American Southwest, crafting singular, cinematic songs as mysterious and magnificent as the arid desert landscapes that inspired them. Founded in Tucson, AZ, by guitarist/singer Joey Burns and drummer John Convertino, the band first emerged to widespread acclaim in the mid-1990s with a string of arresting, evocative records that blurred the lines between their roots, rock, and Latin influences, but it was 2003’s Feast of Wire that truly marked the duo’s commercial and critical breakthrough, earning them their first appearances on the Billboard charts and rave reviews everywhere from The Guardian to Pitchfork, who called the record “genuinely masterful.” In the years to come, Calexico would go on to release seven more similarly well-received studio albums that would help land them slots at Coachella, Bonnaroo, Glastonbury, and Roskilde, alongside dates with the likes of Wilco, Pavement, Arcade Fire, Andrew Bird, and more. The Washington Post hailed the band’s live show as “near-flawless,” while The Chicago Tribunelauded the “vibrant” energy and “compelling conviction” of their performances, and WNYC marveled at the group’s ability to both “roar like Sonic Youth [and] whisper like Elliott Smith” onstage.
Throughout their career, Calexico’s chameleon-like gift for sonic shapeshifting has also made them highly sought after collaborators, both in the studio and on the road. In addition to releasing a pair of widely praised joint records with frequent tourmate Iron & Wine (the latest of which, Years To Burn, garnered two GRAMMY nominations), the band has worked with everyone from Willie Nelson and Jim James to Nancy Sinatra and Neko Case, produced and performed on Amos Lee’s #1 album Mission Bell, and scored multiple feature films.
Calexico’s 2018 album, The Thread That Keeps Us, marked the band’s highest charting collection to date and earned glowing reviews in both the US and abroad, with The Independent awarding the record five stars and NPR proclaiming that the music, “carves out a landscape all its own.”
S.G. Goodman
About S.G. Goodman:
“No one escapes the marks left behind when it comes to love or the absence of it,” says singer-songwriter S.G. Goodman, describing the inspiration behind her sophomore album Teeth Marks. “Not only are we the ones who bear its indentations, but we’re also the ones responsible for placing them on ourselves and others.”
When the Kentucky native released her debut album, Old Time Feeling, she was rightly coined an “untamed rock n roll truth-teller” by Rolling Stone. The roots-inflected rock n’ roll record saw Goodman lending her gritty, haunting vocals to narrate the dual perspectives of her upbringing as the daughter of a crop farmer, and a queer woman coming out in a rural town. Now with Teeth Marks, co-produced by Drew Vandenberg (Faye Webster, Drive-By Truckers, Of Montreal) in Athens, Georgia, she picks up the threads of Old Time Feeling. But where her critically acclaimed, Jim James-produced debut zeroed in on the South, reframing misconceptions in slough water-soaked tones, her latest album pulses with downtown Velvet Underground electricity, shifting its focus inward – though never losing Goodman’s searing and universal point of view. Teeth Marks is what you might get if Flannery O’Connor and Lou Reed went on a road trip. Drawing influences from the aforementioned Velvets, as well as Pavement, Karen Dalton, and Chad VanGaalen, Goodman brings 11 powerful vignettes to life, with a sound that ventures deeper into indie rock and punk territory than she ever has before.
Though Teeth Marks is a love album, Goodman doesn’t aim her focus on romantic relationships alone. Instead, she analyzes the way love between communities, families, and even one’s self can be influenced by trauma that lingers in the body. Teeth Marks is about what love actually is, love’s psychological and physical imprint, its light, and its darkness. It’s a record about the love we have or don’t have for each other, and perhaps, more significantly, the love we have or don’t have for ourselves.