JACKSON HOLE, WYO – A trio of songwriters take the stage this Wednesday at the Center Theater to share the softer side of song aesthetics. Joshua Radin, Lissie and Lily Kershaw are relaxed, emotive singer-songwriters that find lyrical hope out of darkness, with a thin sheen of pop production accompanying their studio efforts.
Lissie will be releasing a new album, When I’m Alone: The Piano Restrospective, this April. This co-headlining show with Radin gives her the opportunity to connect with the audience through storytelling. She made it known a couple of years ago while living in California that she’d grown weary of the music industry, and relocated to a fifty acre farm in Northwest Iowa. Her music reflects this sentiment, with a back-to-the-basics motif.
“I’m seeing my romantic history over the last ten years laid out in song, times when things were challenging, mistakes were made, my feelings were hurt, I acted badly,” explained Lissie about the emotional toll it took to re-record songs on the forthcoming release. “We can use the mistakes as a lesson in order to grow. I feel like being able to go back and revisit my songs is slightly heartbreaking, but also heartening—like, I’ve survived this past decade. I get to decide when and how and what I share.”
For Radin, who didn’t pick up guitar until he was thirty, having a buddy in the TV business spurred his pursuit as a working songwriter. One of his earliest songs, “Winter,” was placed in the hit show Scrubs in 2004 after director and friend Zach Braff took interest. Two years later, Radin signed with Columbia Records and his “whisper rock” songs have been featured on more than one hundred film soundtracks. Now an independent artist based in L.A., his latest self-produced release, The Fall (2017), follows the trajectory of every song that he writes—a journal entry set to music with honest accounts of pitfalls and a rollercoaster of emotion.
Fellow L.A. folk-pop artist Lily Kershaw will open the show. Kershaw released Lost Angeles EP last year, offering “an antidote to the long mythologized Los Angeles glitz.” She released a full-length album, Midnight in the Garden, in 2013 after having a couple of songs on CBS television series, Criminal Minds.
The Center Presents Josh Radin and Lissie with special guest Lily Kershaw at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Center Theater. Tickets are $31-$41, and available at JHCenterForTheArts.org.
Lissie is partnering with PLUS1 so that $1 from every ticket sold on their upcoming tour will go to support Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and their work to safeguard the earth–its people, its plants and animals, and the natural systems on which all life depends.
