• Mavis Staples - "You are Not Alone" - Album Release presented by WFUV W/special guest Jolie Holland
• 8:00pm

Presented by WFUV and City Winery.

Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and soul/gospel legend Mavis Staples delivers more wall-to-wall joy on her triumphant new Anti- album, You Are Not Alone (September 14), than any other release you’re likely to hear this year.  Now you have a chance to witness the incomparale talent that is Mavis Staples and her band with some special suprise guests.

SPECIAL WINE OFFER

VIDEO of CCR "Wrote a Song For Everyone"

JOLIE HOLLAND SOLO OCT 8th

ABOUT MAVIS' NEW ALBUM

Produced by fellow Chicagoan Jeff Tweedy at Wilco’s studio The Loft, the intimate and textured production showcases the iconic singer at her most powerful and fervent. You Are Not Alone mixes traditional gospel numbers with two new songs written for Mavis by Tweedy, plus her unique interpretations of songs by Pops Staples, Randy Newman, Allen Toussaint, John Fogerty, Rev. Gary Davis and Little Milton.

The album features Mavis’s touring band of the last three years: Rick Holmstrom, guitar, vocals; Jeff Turmes, bass, vocals; Stephen Hodges, drums; Donny Gerrard, background vocals; plus special guests Jeff Tweedy on guitars, bass, and vocals; Wilco’s Patrick Sansone, keys, vibes; Mark Greenberg, vibes, keys; with additional background vocals by frequent Neko Case collaborators Kelly Hogan and Nora O’Connor, and Richard Parenti.

You Are Not Alone is Mavis’s second studio release for Anti. It follows her 2007 critical triumph, We’ll Never Turn Back, produced by Ry Cooder, which revisited the great songs of the civil rights era and prompted her hometown paper The Chicago Sun-Times to hail her as “an American treasure.” In 2008, Anti- issued a rapturously received live album, Live: Hope at the Hideout, which was named one of the Best Live CDs of All Time by Amazon.com’s editors and earned Mavis her first Grammy-nomination as a solo artist.

Mavis Staples is enjoying a major career resurgence, having become a festival favorite in recent years. This summer she will play Lollapalooza on August 6, and the Wilco-curated Solid Sound Festival at Mass MoCa on August 14 with additional US and European tour dates to be announced soon.

“All of these songs are me, but in a different way, with a different sound,” says Staples. “The phrasing, the tempos, the arrangements are different, but the messages are the same things I’ve been saying down through the years. They’re about the world today—poverty, jobs, welfare, all of that—and making it feel better through these songs." 

With her bold new album, You Are Not Alone, the legendary vocalist adds a remarkable new chapter to an historic career. Staples is a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winner, and a National Heritage Fellowship Award recipient. VH1 named her one of the 100 Greatest Women of Rock and Roll, and Rolling Stone listed her as one of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time.

Tweedy first saw Staples and her band in 2008 at Chicago’s the Hideout when they recorded the live album Hope At The Hideout. After seeing that performance Tweedy knew he had to work with Staples. A little over a year later Tweedy, Staples and her band: Rick Holmstrom, guitar, vocals; Jeff Turmes, bass, vocals; Stephen Hodges, drums; Donny Gerrard, background vocals entered the studio to record You Are Not Alone.

“Mavis is the walking embodiment of undaunted spirit and courage,” says Tweedy. “She’s an ever-forward looking, positive example for all human beings. And she sounds like she’s in the prime of her life.”

Staples says that from her first meeting with Tweedy, in her South Side neighborhood (“I could tell he felt like he was in a foreign land,” she notes with a laugh), she knew that the pairing would click. “We had quite a bit in common,” she says. “He is totally family—he let me into his life, and I let him into mine. It was a perfect blend.”

When she ventured to Tweedy’s home base at the Wilco Loft studio, the two of them sat down and listened to some of the selections he had made as potential material for an album. “The songs he had chosen were great,” she says. “They let me know that he knew me, my background, what was good for me.”

“I have almost everything she’s ever recorded, and I dug back through very thoroughly when I was given this job to do,” says Tweedy.

You Are Not Alone caps an incredible decade for Mavis Staples, a resurgence that saw her receive Grammy nominations in blues, gospel, folk, and pop categories. She claims, in fact, that she has done so much diverse work recently that, until Jeff Tweedy helped guide the way, she wasn’t sure of her direction.

“I wanted to make an album where every song had meaning,” she says, “where every song told a story and would lift you up and give you a reason to get up in the morning. And I know it’s going to feel really good singing these songs on stage.”