Author: michael

Categories
Featured News Taping Announcement

New taping: Beck

We’re pleased to announce the return of Beck to Austin City Limits on Apr. 27.

Beck is back with the release of Morning Phase, already one of the most critically-acclaimed albums of the year, being hailed as a companion piece to his 2002 gem Sea Change. In fact, the trailblazing singer and songwriter last visited the show in 2002, hot on the heels of Sea Change. Beck’s recent live performances have earned raves as some of the very best of his storied career, and we’re thrilled to have him return for our 40th season.

Please join us in welcoming Beck back to the ACL stage.

Information about how to get tickets to this taping will be posted in April.

 

Categories
Featured News

Happy birthday to Townes Van Zandt

Happy birthday to Townes Van Zandt, who would have been 70 today. One of the Lone Star State’s greatest songwriters, the Fort Worth native has an inestimable legacy – a few of his classic tunes include “Pancho & Lefty,” “To Live is To Fly,” “If I Needed You,” “Tecumseh Valley,” “Waitin’ Round to Die,” “Lungs” and “A Song For.”

Van Zandt appeared in a memorable episode in the very first season of Austin City Limits in 1976, as well as joining Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock and David Halley in a songwriters special in 1983. In 1998 ACL presented a tribute show led by his longtime friend Guy Clark and his son John T. Van Zandt that was so popular it was represented in 2000 as an ACL Classic. Please join us in wishing happy birthday to the late, great Townes Van Zandt.

Categories
Featured News Taping Announcement

Austin City Limits announces new tapings for 40th season

Austin City Limits is excited to unveil more tapings for our upcoming 40th Season! It’s an eclectic line-up of music icons and innovators including Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Valerie June, Eric Church and Thao & The Get Down Stay Down.

We’re thrilled to have the debut of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, taping their episode on July 20th. One of contemporary music’s most powerful personalities, the Australian-born singer-songwriter of dark songs and dark voice will take the ACL stage with his longtime band for what promises to be a mesmerizing performance.

Tennessee-to-New York transplant Valerie June makes her first appearance on the ACL stage on May 28th, performing songs from her luminous debut, hailed one of “the 50 Best Albums of 2013” by Rolling Stone.

San Francisco-based folk-rockers Thao & The Get Down Stay Down tape their ACL debut on August 14th.  Led by enigmatic singer-songwriter Thao Nguyen, the band has built a devoted following based on their spirited live shows.

Breakout country star Eric Church tapes his ACL debut on September 23rd, performing songs from his critically-acclaimed new album The Outsiders, which debuted at #1 on Billboard‘s Top 200 and Country charts.  Spin  proclaimed Church “the most exciting, sonically fearless singer in Nashville.”

49th Annual Academy Of Country Music Awards - Alternative ViewsAnd as previously mentioned the first taping of the new season features the return of music legends Los Lobos to the ACL stage on April 14th.

photo by Michael Weintrob

Broadcast episodes begin airing this fall as part of ACL’s Season 40. Select tapings will be live streamed so music lovers everywhere can experience the performances as they happen, live and unedited. Visit acltv.com for news regarding future tapings, episode schedules and 40th Anniversary updates.

 

Categories
Featured New Broadcast News

Nine Inch Nails episode airs April 5

Austin City Limits announces a special broadcast featuring NINE INCH NAILS making a rare television appearance in an epic, full-hour performance. The new episode premieres on Saturday, April 5th as a preview of ACL’s 40th Anniversary Season. NIN’s arena-worthy ACL debut showcases ten songs, and will encore during the PBS music series Season 40, launching in the fall of 2014.

Nine Inch Nails joins the list of legendary artists that have performed on ACL. NIN’s Trent Reznor and the seven-piece Tension Tour band—Alessandro Cortini, Josh Eustis, Robin Finck, Lisa Fischer, Sharlotte Gibson, Pino Palladino and Ilan Rubin—deliver an electrifying performance that is a masterpiece of tension and release. In his remarks from the ACL stage, Reznor said, “We didn’t want to make ACL a NIN show. We wanted to be out of our element.” Reznor added in a recent Reddit AMA: “I have a lot of respect for ACL and I wanted us to be a guest on THEIR show, not to convert their show into our concert. It was unusual to perform in that environment, and ended up being one of the best shows I think we played.”

NIN deliver one of the best live shows on the planet, are considered a pioneer in the industrial music movement and have been highly influential in the evolution of electronic music. The band recently released their first album in five years, the critically-acclaimed Hesitation Marks, which Spin magazine called “the most important artistic statement from Reznor since the late 90s” and Rolling Stone hailed “one of his best” in a four-star lead review.

Stay tuned to acltv.com for episode schedules, news regarding live streams of upcoming tapings and 40th Anniversary updates.

 

Categories
Episode Recap Featured New Broadcast News

Kacey Musgraves & Dale Watson two-step through ACL’s new season

Austin City Limits closes out Season 39 with a spectacular hour of country music, Texas-style, featuring the ACL debuts of Grammy Award-winning Texas native Kacey Musgraves and Austin’s own country icon Dale Watson.

Breakout country artist Kacey Musgraves walked away with two trophies for Best Country Album and Best Country Song at this year’s Grammy Awards for her critically-acclaimed major label debut Same Trailer Different Park. The release produced the hit singles “Follow Your Arrow” and the Grammy-winning “Merry Go ‘Round” and topped many critics’ 2013 year-end best lists including Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Country Weekly, Spin and The New York Times, with Rolling Stone calling her “the gen aught Loretta Lynn…ballsy, unsentimental, thoroughly pop and yet totally in the (country) tradition.” Viewers will want to pull up a chair for a front row seat to one of the most arresting ACL debuts of the season. “Welcome to our little trailer park,” says the twenty-five year old singer-songwriter, kicking off her radiant performance surrounded by a white picket fence and porch lights. Musgrave’s honest, effortless vocals shine on songs that demonstrate her witty knack for storytelling in a bold, irresistible ACL set.

“If you didn’t know much about Kacey Musgraves before her triumph at the Grammys, you’ll really know what the buzz is all about after seeing her ACL performance,” says executive producer Terry Lickona. “She’s a remarkable songwriter and all-around talent who is blazing new trails for women in country music.”

Next up is Austin’s king of country music: Dale Watson. Called “the silver pompadoured, baritone beltin’, Lone Star beer drinkin’, honky-tonk hellraiser” by The Austin Chronicle, the hometown hero has flown the flag for classic honky-tonk for over two decades and twenty albums. His latest album, El Rancho Azul, continues his work as one of the world’s finest C&W singers and songwriters, and ACL is thrilled to present Austin’s favorite son in his first feature performance. For Watson’s set, the ACL studio is transformed into a substitute for his regular Austin haunt Ginny’s Little Longhorn, with a room full of dancers two-stepping in the time-honored manner and he gets the ATX audience fired up with “Honkiest, Tonkiest Beer Joint,” his paean to the legendary saloon. Watson turns on the Texas charm as he performs a career-spanning, crowd-pleasing set, turning ACL into a full-on honky-tonk complete with Texas shuffles, closing out the season in good fun on a glorious high note.

“Dale is the real deal. Nobody else is making country music like this today,” Lickona says. “It’s time for the rest of the world to discover why he’s so special to us in Austin.”

Check out the episode page for more details. Be sure and visit our Facebook and Twitter pages or sign up for our newsletter for more ACL news and happenings. Next week: Arcade Fire.

Categories
Featured Gear Blog News

Gear Blog: Sarah Jarosz and The Milk Carton Kids

We hope everybody enjoyed this weekend’s episode featuring Sarah Jarosz and The Milk Carton Kids. If you missed it, you can catch it here. In the meantime, our longtime audio support guy and intrepid gear reporter gives us a new installment in our Gear Blog series, featuring the equipment onstage with these solely acoustic acts. Take it away, Kevin. 

Sarah Jarosz is no stranger to the viewers of PBS affiliate KLRU (home of Austin City Limits). Many Austinites recall being introduced to a barely teenage Sarah in a segment on the local children’s show The Biscuit Brothers. Even by then she was already a fixture of the Central Texas bluegrass and folk scene. Sarah released her first album at 17, then headed Boston to study composition at The New England Conservatory and found time to record and tour during her studies. This is Sarah’s second appearance on ACL – she made her first ACL appearance in Season 36 with Steve Martin.  Nathaniel Smith (cello) and Alex Hargreaves (mandolin and fiddle) also mark their return with Sarah.

Sarah brought a Collings  D1 dreadnought acoustic guitar and MF5 mandolin. Fortuitously, Sarah and the Collings factory both hail from Wimberly, Texas.

Sarah also brought what looks like a custom built “Burning Sun” banjo built by Blanco, Texas piano restorer Bernard Mollberg.  The esoteric instrument to the right is an octave mandolin crafted by Fletcher Brock of Seattle, Washington.

All instruments on stage run to their own pickups into their own dedicated Radial Tonebone PZ-Pres and then into the PA.

Hailing from Eagle Rock, California, Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan formed, The Milk Carton Kids in 2011 – after years of paying  dues as solo artists, they were hailed as an overnight sensations as a duo. Whereas Ms. Jarosz and company avail themselves of a more modern technology to amplify their acoustic instruments, Ryan and Pattengale go the old-fashioned route and use microphones exclusively to project the sound of their voices and instruments. For the taping, MCK brought their own preferred setup of Ear Trumpet Lab microphones. Below you’ll see a couple of pictures of a far more complicated set-up than what was used at the actual taping. For the recorded show, “the less is more” approach was decided and a single microphone was used. Though one microphone makes life simpler (or probably more complicated) for the sound guys, it necessitates a more dynamic approach to performing for Kenneth and Joey, meaning they have to physically move toward and away from the microphone as their musical parts dictate. That’s quite an accomplishment of technique that is rarely seen these days.

Pictured are the Edwina models for vocals and the Ednas placed lower for the guitars. Though they may look ancient, Ear Trumpet Lab mics are quite contemporary, extremely versatile, and very affordable.

Joey plays a 1951 Gibson J-45, pictured below. Kenneth plays a 1954 Martin 0-15.