The Underwater Sunshine Festival is returning to New York for 2019 this weekend. Underwater Sunshine is curated by Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz and co-founded with Barbara Rappaport.
Duritz and Rappaport founded the festival to pair independent music artists with passionate music fans. “It’s honestly my favorite time of year. I love when everyone shows up in New York and, for a week or so, I get to just drown in great music,” Adam said in a statement.
Jesse Malin will perform with a VIP set on Friday.
Underwater Sunshine Festival – April 2019 Lineup:
JORDAN KLASSEN
The singer-songwriter moniker has long caused him discomfort, as he felt that it connoted a very specific sound, namely “acoustic guitars and shitty coffee shops.” In past records such as Javelin (2016) and Repentance (2013), Klassen strived for a cinematic sound, avoiding drum kits and anything that sounded like a band. In Big Intruder, Klassen confronts those prejudices. He spent a lot of time listening to the greats—Harry Nilsson, Paul McCartney and John Lennon, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell—and broadened his own understanding of the singer-songwriter concept.
ERIC HUTCHINSON
To see an Eric Hutchinson show is to be fully entertained. Hutchinson and his band, The Believers, have toured extensively, building a reputation for a high-energy live show, full of four-part harmonies, incredible musicianship, humility, and humor. A show for any music lover, Eric brings the audience to him, playing his unique songs and telling the funny, moving and one-of-a-kind stories that made him the artist he is today.
RED WANTING BLUE
Hailed as “Midwestern rock heroes” by American Songwriter, Red Wanting Blue has spent the last twenty years establishing themselves as one of the indie world’s most enduring and self-sufficient acts, notching appearances everywhere from Letterman to NPR and reaching #3 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart, all while operating largely outside the confines of the traditional music industry.
CAMERON McGILL
Cameron McGill is a writer, instructor, and musician from Champaign, IL and the poetry editor of Blood Orange Review. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Idaho. He is the recipient of a scholarship to the New York State Summer Writers Institute, a Centrum Fellowship to The Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, and a 2018 Summer Fishtrap Fellowship. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Willow Springs, The Harvard Advocate, Grist and others. He lives in Moscow, ID and teaches in the English Department at Washington State University.
PETAL
She moved from New York City to Philadelphia, toured with Julien Baker, Slingshot Dakota and Kevin Devine, and chose to come out and live openly as queer, just to name a few. Still, the good wasn’t able to outweigh the bad, and in early 2017, Lotz found herself hitting a breaking point. Ultimately, she made the difficult decision to move back to her hometown to enter intensive treatment for her mental health issues. It was that duality – the valley between the positives and negatives of life that she’d experienced – that inspired Magic Gone and its two halves. Side A, titled Tightrope Walker, features songs Lotz wrote before entering treatment, while Side B, Miracle Clinger, is comprised of songs she wrote in recovery.
FORT GORGEOUS
Formed in Brooklyn, NY, Fort Gorgeous is the musical moniker of songwriter/guitarist Billy Libby. As a person sitting on a see-saw of optimism and pessimism, Billy creates pensive and atmospheric songs based heavily on intricate guitar melodies with lyrics that contemplate themes like death and the severity of all choices made in life. When not slipping into the darkness of all of life’s “what ifs”, Billy is often excited about life like a kid at an arcade with $30.
AMY VACHAL
Amy Vachal is a singer/songwriter based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The sale of two paintings brought her to New York seven years ago. The first was of a half-naked singer in the center of a crowded Webster Hall. The other, of High Line strangers wandering high above 10th Ave. Both, set in the very city she’d soon call home. She painted them at Swarthmore College where she studied Studio Arts and Econ. and recorded her first handful of songs called Appleseed. Most of her early lyrics were penned on paper cups and waitress pads before their debut at various open mics and cafes downtown. Soon she became a regular at Rockwood Music Hall where she met Ken Rockwood, an indie label owner and producer of her second EP called Crinkle Bloom.
ROAN YELLOWTHORN
Roan Yellowthorn front woman Jackie McLean, supported by producer and multi-instrumentalist Shawn Strack, delivers ethereal indie rock songs with a singer/songwriter heart. Listeners find themselves singing-along to the catchy melodies while simultaneously becoming immersed in the story behind each song.
The Underwater Sunshine Festival, is taking place this weekend, April 5-6 at New York City’s Bowery Electric.
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