An Evening with Susan Werner April 18, 2008

Tickets & info: 410-521-9099

Friday, April 18th
SUSAN WERNER
Meg Hutchinson opens
Tickets $20.00

With 6 albums under her belt, an active touring career throughout the U.S. and a string of accolades from the likes of The Washington Post, The Village Voice and The New Yorker, Susan Werner has become one of the defining artists of the folk music genre. Her songs effortlessly slide between folk, jazz and pop, and are delivered with a sassy wit and classic mid-western charm. Her new album "The Gospel Truth" explores the role of the Church in contemporary American life. Quite possibly the first "agnostic gospel" album, her new songs speak in a wide variety of voices, from faithful and traditional to the critical and even the unconvinced.
Inspired by a Nanci Griffith concert, Werner left behind her opera training and began performing as a singer-songwriter at coffeehouses throughout the northeast. She self-released her first album "Midwestern Saturday Night" in 1992 and then went on to put out "Live at Tin Angel" the following year. In 1995 came her breakout album, BMG/Private Music's "Last of the Good Straight Girls," but a corporate reshuffle left her and her folk-pop masterpiece behind. Werner went on, recording two albums even better than her previous work, adding some country and soul sounds to her signature vocal stylings with the help of Nashville multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Darrell Scott, who produced "Time Between Trains" and Colin Linden (Blackie & The Rodeo Kings), who produced her 2001 "New Non-Fiction." Always ready to reinvent herself, in 2004 Susan Werner released her album of instant songbook classics "I Can't Be New" on Koch Records. For years she incorporated cabaret-style numbers in her live performances, exchanging her guitar for a piano and she'd been asked by her audience to put all those songs in one recording. Fans and critics alike sang her praises: the All Music Guide calling it "a brilliantly constructed, soulful, and cleverly tender effort by a songwriter and musician who is in such complete command of her gifts that it's almost scary." In 2005 Susan made a splash on satellite radio and in the blogosphere with her "alternative national anthem" entitled "My Strange Nation." 2007 brings the release of Werner's latest endeavor, "The Gospel Truth," a collection of originals she describes as "hymns for the spiritually ambivalent." "Susan Werner is one of the most innovative songwriters working today." ~ Howard Reich, Chicago Tribune. (www.susanwerner.com)

Although only 29 years old, Meg Hutchinson has garnered much critical attention for her unique alto vocals and resonating, razor-sharp lyrics, and her sophisticated folk/pop songwriting has endeared her to such acclaimed songwriters as Susan Werner, John Gorka and Catie Curtis, folk greats with whom she will be touring in support of her new album on Red House Records “Come Up Full.” “A master of introspective ballads filled with understated yearning and an exquisite sense of metaphor, Hutchinson delivers her songs with a gently affecting poetic grace.” - Performing Songwriter.
(www.meghutchinson.com)

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