Block Heater 2019: Friday

It’s big. It’s back. It’s Calgary Folk Music Festival’s Block Heater 2019!

Schedule: 

7:00 pm – Shaela Miller

8:40 pm – UNION DUES with Shaela Miller, Paper Beat Scissors, Andrew Combs and Carter Felker

10:30 pm – Paper Beat Scissors

About Shaela Miller (via Block Heater)

Long a fixture of the Alberta country music underground, Lethbridge singer-songwriter Shaela Miller has remained steadfast in her dedication to country’s traditions, ensuring that the high and lonesome sound of the old saloons and dancehalls remains alive and in good hands here in the west. Her voice is cut from the same cloth as legends, emotionally bare on the heartbreakers and tough as a broken bottle on the two-step shakers. Backed by her ace band of honky tonkers from The Windy City, Shaela Miller is no throwback, she’s a vital player in the current movement to restoring country music’s integrity and ensuring the style’s lasting vitality.

About Paper Beat Scissors (via Block Heater)

Shhh. Listen. Can you hear the whispers in a dream? Beautiful and surreal, United Kingdom native Tim Crabtree’s music and voice float along on a stream of consciousness, sometimes brushing past flowers hanging low over the banks from within the shadowy forest of existence, sometimes catching on thorns fierce with pain and passion.

This music catches listeners the way your world-weary, hungover face catches yourself in the mirror: nakedly, honestly, precisely. No wonder Paper Beat Scissor’s first album ended up haunting the CBC and BBC airwaves. A residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts brought the classical bones of this experimental folk project to the surface; at Block Heater, a six-piece orchestral ensemble will join Crabtree to perform arrangements written there.

About Andrew Combs (via Block Heater)

His covers of Lucinda, The Strokes and Radiohead hint that Dallas native Andrew Combs is not your average Nashville cat; his penchant for writing songs that capture the divine stitched inside the sleeve of the mundane show why. Like Harry Nilsson or Mickey Newbury before him, his songs roll out the red carpet of melody and lyrics to entice other artists to cover them for decades to come.

His sweet, clear vocals and modest, gourmet production accompany pop as it takes a walk through Nashville like a 21st century Glenn Campbell. Simple moments, like seeing your reflection in the sidewalk in the rain, are cast in a golden hue not thrown by nostalgia’s spectacles but by the sign over the tavern door where the observer and the observed meet.

About Carter Felker (via Block Heater)

Calgary born Carter Felker traffics in music, yes, but more profoundly in essence: the humdrum essence of Monday morning alarm clocks; the craven essence of sneaking wordlessly away from a relationship and feeling the mute screen door sag shut behind you; the essence of everyday struggles. Vestigial tales of good women who rightfully don’t trust their men, grocery store clerks searching for meaning, friends who drink themselves into the grave, and time that walks with you every moment like a friend but kills you in the end. These are songs about people on life’s highway looking for Exit 0, all crafted with some of the gentlest melodies to ever cuddle up to a bad dream.

Find more information about the timing and lineup here.