eTown Taping with The Cactus Blossoms and special guest

Doors: 6 p.m. Show: 7 p.m. All Ages Welcome No Refunds or Exchanges We are committed to making eTown accessible to all. If you have ADA needs or require accommodations, please contact us in advance, and we will gladly work with you to ensure a comfortable experience. With every eTown ticket purchase, you're supporting the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. eTown donates $1 per ticket to Conscious Alliance, aiding hunger relief, youth programs and sustainable solutions for the Oglala Lakota Nation. More than just a regular concert, eTown Radio Tapings are a unique live experience! The show includes performances and interviews with both of our visiting artists, and an interview segment with changemakers from our local and national community who are doing their part to make the world a better place. As an attendee, you serve as a vital part of our eTown show, which will be broadcast across the country on our affiliate radio stations and all streaming platforms. Listen for your cheers on the radio, and to hear how it all comes together, in just a few weeks following the night! Cell phone use, photos (from phones and professional cameras), and audio and video recording are all strictly prohibited during the radio taping. Thanks for your understanding, and for your help in allowing the artists and audience to be present for this special evening together! About The Cactus Blossoms: At its best, harmony duo singing can transform simple math into a magic trick. One plus one, instead of equaling two, suddenly yields an unexpected third thing. An upper-case ONE. A universal hum. A deep vibration that encompasses two different points of view. On their latest release, Every Time I Think About You, brothers Jack Torrey and Page Burkum, aka The Cactus Blossoms, once again prove themselves to be among the most adept – and distinctive – modern practitioners of that magic. But like any great magician, The Cactus Blossoms can’t – or won’t – fully explain the illusion they create. “Harmonies are a big part of our sound, but in some ways they’re the part we focus on the least,” says Page. “We put most of our attention and energy into the songs themselves and then the harmonies just happen.” There’s all kinds of magic happening on Every Time I Think About You, a record that sounds more like a band than any other in the Cactus Blossoms discography, thanks to contributions from Jeremy Hanson (drums), Jacob Hanson (guitar) and Phillip Hicks (bass). “There She Goes” casts its romantic regret against a danceable bop beat, and the title track is a heart-wrencher about loss and letting go. “Even if you don’t set out to write songs with a theme in mind it seems like one usually presents itself,” says Jack. “This record keeps returning to the idea of ‘moving on’ — from one place to another, from people and situations that bring you down, from loss and grief.” About Margaret Glaspy: In an era of excess and endless distraction, the New York-based singer/songwriter Margaret Glaspy rejects the noise in favor of something far more essential. On the self-possessed title track for her new album I Am Both, Margaret offers an ardent refusal of any outside pressure to compromise her multidimensionality. “I wrote ‘I Am Both’ a while ago; the story is based on a female character that I look up to deeply—a woman who contains multitudes while seeing reality very clearly,” she says. “It can feel safer to try to fit myself into a category, but I find that embracing my own complexity is much healthier for me.” That embrace of complexity runs throughout the album’s 11 tracks. In the making of I Am Both, Margaret away from social media and soon discovered a clarity of mind she hadn’t experienced in years, followed by a sustained burst of creative momentum. As she penned her lyrics in longhand and then polished them up on a typewriter, she assembled a selection of songs that span from fictional vignettes to unguarded self-revelation to empathetic observation of the troubled world around her. Produced by Joe Henry (the three-time Grammy-winning singer/songwriter/producer known for his work with luminaries like Aimee Mann and Joan Baez), I Am Both ultimately stands as a striking new statement from one of the modern music canon’s most formidable songwriters. “When I started writing for this record I had a goal of getting my practice back—to walk the walk in terms of how I envision myself as a songwriter,” says Margaret, a Northern California-bred artist who made her debut with 2016’s lavishly acclaimed Emotions and Math. “At first it was really hard to break that addiction to social media, but after a while something shifted. It felt like I’d gotten back to original thought instead of being under the influence of so many outside opinions. It was life-changing.” Her fourth full-length album, I Am Both emerged from three days of sessions at New York City’s Reservoir Studios, where Margaret recorded live with drummer/percussionist Jay Bellerose (Bonnie Raitt, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss), keyboardist Patrick Warren (Tracy Chapman, Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen) and bassist Ross Gallagher (Paula Cole, Grails). “I always think of myself as more of a photographer than a sculptor in the studio—it’s about capturing the moment rather than layering and building things up over time, and Joe has a similar mentality when it comes to recording,” says Margaret, who first connected with Henry at a T Bone Burnett-curated tribute to Bob Dylan at New York’s Town Hall in 2022. “There was an incredible chemistry with the band and the whole process felt electric, so a lot of what you hear on the album is the first take.” The follow-up to 2023’s Echo the Diamond (hailed by Uncut as “songs that glint like shards of glass yet brim with love, grief, courage, existential doubt and all the stuff that makes us human”), I Am Both brings Margaret’s disarmingly direct vocals and eloquent guitar work to a cathartic form of folk-leaning indie-rock. In a potent introduction to the LP’s luminous immediacy, the album opens on “Michigan”—a lush and lacerating piece of storytelling that imagines a post-breakup escape to the Midwest. “I was in Michigan a couple years back and had a really beautiful time, and thought about how New Yorkers sometimes fantasize about the countryside as a retreat from the intensity of the city,” Margaret says. “It turned into a song about someone going through a bad breakup, and then deciding to just leave the city behind.” Like “Michigan,” a number of songs on I Am Both unfold as finely detailed story fragments that privilege impression over exposition, each one etched with a precise emotional truth. On the wildly romantic “That Rose,” Margaret spins distanced longing into something gloriously surreal (“I dreamt you looked into the clouds like they were my eyes / You made them blush—the clouds got shy”). “It was fun to write a love story where the jealousy is almost sweet.” One of several songs featuring Glaspy’s soulful performance on harmonica, “Common Ground” tilts toward a Dylan-esque acerbic wit. “That song feels relevant to the culture these days. There’s a tendency to either put people on a pedestal or dismiss them entirely, instead of perceiving them as human beings or using our own reasoning.” Another outward-looking and galvanizing track, “Martin Luther King Jr.” reframes passages from a 1957 sermon by the legendary civil rights leader, recasting his wisdom in light of present-day emergencies like the U.S. housing crisis. “I’ve been listening to Martin Luther King’s speeches for a long time, and I find so much inspiration in how transcendent his public speaking is,” says Margaret. “His work is obviously very pertinent to what we’re going through right now in America and the world over.” Throughout I Am Both, Margaret reveals one of the more thrilling outcomes of deepening her creative practice: a commitment to following her own internal logic when structuring songs.