• SONGS AND STORIES - An Evening with Joe Ely, Terry Allen, and Ryan Bingham - 4/20
• 8:00pm

Please note that some tickets may still be available for this show, please call 212-608-0555 x472 to inquire today, April 20th from 11 a.m.-5 p.m.

TICKETS FOR 4/21 - CLICK HERE

Join three incomparable artists as they join forces for three nights of lonesome sonngs of the high prairie. Ryan Bingham, Terry Allen and Joe Ely are all songwriters of a particular bent, who are able to seamlessly craft songs that touch on the human spirit in way's oft overlooked. 

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ABOUT RYAN BINGHAM

For some artists, winning an Oscar would represent reaching a pinnacle. For Ryan Bingham, who took home the Academy Award for “The Weary Kind,” his hauntingly beautiful theme song for the acclaimed film Crazy Heart, it instead represented a crossroads and a decision about which path to take.

“When there are a lot of people around saying ‘look, you have to capitalize on this and do something really commercial,’ you might think about it for a second,” admits the LA-based singer-songwriter. “But at the end of the day, there’s not a chance in hell I could do that. It made me sick to my stomach just thinking about it. I couldn’t get up in front of people and play a bunch of stuff that didn’t mean anything to me.”

The same might be said for Bingham himself. Born in New Mexico and raised all across the Southwest, he set out on his own at a young age, shuffling from town to town looking for a place to sleep between rodeos, day labor, and a weekly gig at a no-frills local bar.

That spirit infused Bingham’s Lost Highway debut, Mescalito, which won kudos from media outlets as varied as Rolling Stone, Esquire and The Washington Post - the latter noted “anyone seeking to invent a modern-day Texas troubadour couldn’t do better than to replicate Ryan Bingham’s life story.” Indeed, the disc opened many illuminating windows into the soul of a man who, despite still being in his twenties, had already done plenty of living.

Those experiences served Bingham well, earning him more critical acclaim for 2009’s Roadhouse Sun, a disc that prompted Billboard to defer comparisons to forebears and note “Bingham's not a ‘new’ anything: He's his own man, and a singular talent at that.” That’s high praise indeed, but the opinion was shared by plenty of the singer-songwriter’s musical peers, including T Bone Burnett, who he collaborated with on the soundtrack for Crazy Heart.
“The director gave me the script, but after not hearing from him for a couple of months, I thought I had fallen off the radar,” he recalls. “When I got ‘The Weary Kind’ over to him, everything happened really fast from there. It was a lot of fun getting the opportunity to work with guys like T Bone Burnett, Stephen Bruton and Jeff Bridges.”

ABOUT TERRY ALLEN

Terry Allen is a visual artist and songwriter who was raised in Lubbock, Texas. He graduated from Chouinard Art Inst. in Los Angeles and has worked as an artist & musician since 1966. He has received numerous awards and honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship and National Endowment for the Art Fellowships; Awards for the Visual Arts (AVA), Washington D.C.; Bessie (New York) and Isadora Duncan (San Francisco) Critic Awards for text, music, sets, costumes for PEDAL STEAL (Margaret Jenkins Dance Co.); AICA Award 2004, 2nd place (International Association of Art Critics) for Best Show in Commerical Gallery, for DUGOUT I, LA Louver Gallery, Venice, CA, curated by Peter Goulds; Induction into the Buddy Holly Walk of Fame in 1992;  USA Artists Fellowship / USA Oliver Fellow, 2009.

His work has been shown throughout the United States and Inter-nationally, including Documenta and San Paolo, Paris, Sydney & Whitney Biennales and is represented in major private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and L.A. County Museum of Art in Los Angeles and Houston & Dallas Museums of Fine Art. His numerous public commissions can be found in such places as L.A.'s Citi-Corps Plaza, San Francisco Moscone Center, The Stuart Collection at UCSD in La Jolla, CA, Oliver Ranch in Sonoma, CA and Denver, Houston and Dallas/Ft. Worth Intercontinental airports. His book & theater piece DUGOUT was published in 2005 by Univ. of Texas Press and an extensive monograph TERRY ALLEN of Allen's work is scheduled for publication in 2010, also Univ. Texas Press.

He has written for and worked in both radio and theater. Some of his selected staged works include JUAREZ, THE EMBRACE...ADVANCED TO FURY, and ANTI-RABBIT BLEEDER, which he wrote and directed; PIONEER, set design, co-written with Jo Harvey Allen & Rende Eckert, directed by Robert Woodruff, Paul Dresser Production, performed throughout USA; LEON AND LENA (and Lentz), composer, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, MN; CHIPPY, Diaries of a West Texas Hooker, set & costume design, co-written with Jo Harvey Allen, music co-written with Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, directed by Evan Yianoulis, co-produced by American Music Theater Festival, Philadelphia, PA & Lincoln Center's 'Serious Fun' series, New York, NY.

Allen has recorded 11 albums of original songs, including classics JUAREZ and LUBBOCK (on everything), and his most recent SALIVATION on Sugar Hills Records. His songs have been recorded by such diverse artists as: Bobby Bare, Guy Clark, Little Feat, Robert Earl Keen, David Byrne, Doug Sahm, Ricky Nelson and Lucinda Williams. He has written numerous songs for film and theater, including the music soundtrack for Jane Anderson's Showtime Emmy nominated THE BABY DANCE. He has been described by critic Dave Hickey in the Los Angeles Times as "...renowned for his effortless command and outrageous combination of disparate genres and media, according to the task at hand." Terry Allen lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife, actress and writer, Jo Harvey Allen.

ABOUT JOE ELY

Everybody else romances the road. Joe Ely lives it. Call him what you want - a wandering minstrel, gypsy cowboy, visionary song poet, or houserocker on fire - whatever he is, Ely's covered a lot of ground in his time. He really has ridden the rails (in a circus train, no less), thumbed his way across the country, hopped boats to exotic foreign lands, and ridden horses across the prairie. All part of the relentless quest for revelation that only a journey can satisfy.

Those sort of restless yearnings come naturally to a boy from Lubbock, Texas, where the flat dusty landscape, endless sky and vast horizons have inspired several generations of young creative types to fill up all that empty space with music, as Buddy Holly did, as did Waylon Jennings, and Roy Orbison all the way to the current Lubbock Mob consisting of Ely and his compadres Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, and Terry Allen. Like them, Joe Ely has proved to himself before he proved to a growing number of faithful that when it comes to the mystical process of writing, singing, and performing music, there's no pretending or holding back. Where he comes from, you put your emotions ofn the line each and every night.

That upbringing led Joe Ely to roam the earth and preach the gospel of the Roadhouse, extolling the virtues of the nowhere-else-but-Texas pressure cooker enviornment where hard core country and the rawest kind of rock and roll collide on the dancefloor every Saturday night.

The first milestone was a band called the Flatlanders, formed in Lubbock more than twenty years ago by Ely, Hancock and Gilmore. Their visionary melding of country, rock, and fold immediately pegged them as three singer- songwriters who were ahead of their time and way too experimental for Nashville.

Next came the Joe Ely Band, Joe's own ensemble who once again mixed country and rock elements into something new and completely different, proving to anyone that heard them that an accordion or pedal steel guitar really could pack the same sonic punch as an electric guitar. In England, the Panhandle poets and his pickers were embraced by the Clash, the standard bearers of the nascent punk movement, who might not have shared the same cultural values as the West Texans, but who certainly knew integrity when they heard it.

Since then, Ely has gained the respect of his friends and his peers, including such kindred spirits as Bruce Springsteen, who contributes vocals on his latest album, along with old friend Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and new friend Raul Malo of the Mavericks.

Whatever qualities grabbed their attention, Joe Ely remains a Texas origional. In Austin, where he now lives and works, a body of work that spans thirteen albums and his willingness to put it all on the line each and every night have rightfully accorded him status akin to royalty.

But no matter how virtuous those qualities and associations seem in retrospect, and no matter how illustrious his performing and recording career may be, all the accomplishments and accolades suddenly seem like mere preludes that have been building up to Letter to Laredo. On this collections of songs, Joe Ely simply sets out to demonstrate what all the fuss is about.

He sings of distance, about rivers and ranches, of smoldering passions and sad laments, of faraway longing and unrequited love. He sings of journeys that take him from the High Plains of West Texas to dark and mysterious flamenco bars in Spanish Andalusia, where Arab, African, and European influences commingle. And more than once he can be seen and heard chasing hearts and souls south across the Rio Grande.

The voice is that of a man who speaks fluently the patois of honky tonks and jook joints, who can hold an audience around a campfire riveted untill the break of dawn, or inspire a crowd of thousands to kick up their bootheels in a two-step or a stomp. It's a voice that can converse with a pistolero as directly as it conveys intimacy to a lover, or articulates that high lonesome feeling known to everyone who has ever hurt. So pull up a chair, cut a rug, or hit the highway. Listener's choice. The songs that Joe Ely sings are the stuff that make anyone's journey something worth remembering.