One whole sentence seems to sum up the life of the English/Canadian singer and songwriter Alice Merton. Four countries and eleven moves later, she starts to take her first independant steps into the music industry. With success – No Roots reached top positions on iTunes, Spotify, Shazam and Hype Machine. In Germany and Austria, the song has already reached platinum status. No Roots was also #1 in the french and #2 in the german official single charts.

Raised in Canada, finishing high school in Germany, then moving on to England with her family, Alice has gotten quite used to packing and unpacking boxes.

With her debut single No Roots, she describes the life of having had many different homes, but comes to the realization that her home was never in one place.

At the age of five she started taking classical piano lessons, four years later she was introduced to vocal training. After spending many years being classically trained, Alice discovered the art of songwriting through one of her high school courses in Germany. She then went on to study songwriting and pursue her dream of becoming a professional singer/songwriter.

During her studies she started working with various producers. „Finding the right producer is like finding a missing puzzle piece, you know it’s there somewhere, but it takes a really long time to find.”

However, after being introduced to Nicolas Rebscher, a berlin-based producer, she knew she had found her match.

Creating a very analog and organic pop sound, going back to the basics of drum and bass driven music, they combined their individual styles to develop a style of their own. Nicolas Rebscher’s arrangements were the perfect addition to Alice’s melodies, combining the depth and softness in her voice, with his energetic and charistmatic sounds.

By expanding her team with the designer Susann Bosslau and founding her own record label Paper Plane Records with her manager, Alice Merton has definately taken a DIY route, but is convinced that it is the right decision for now. „lt takes time to develop as an artist, and nowadays there is so much pressure from major labels. I wanted to have creative freedom when it came to my music.”

Time

(Wednesday) 7:00 pm

Location

U Street Music Hall

1115 U Street NW Washington, DC, 20009

Cost

$20

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17oct7:00 pm11:00 pmSmut Slam DC: On the EdgeWhere Sex and Storytelling Collide in the Capital7:00 pm - 11:00 pm Ten Tigers Parlour

Event Details

This event will be ASL interpreted!

The quickened breath, the adrenaline hit, the racing pulse– for many of us, there’s an erotic thrill in a little danger. As we get close to the sexy-scary joys of Halloween, let’s turn down the lights and get our delights in stories of our most heart-pounding (CONSENSUAL) encounters.

(Not familiar with Smut Slam? It’s a storytelling open mic where audience members sign up for 5-minute slots to tell their best real-life, first-person, consensual sex stories. It’s queer-friendly, kink-friendly, lifestyle-friendly, body-positive, sex-positive, and wildly fun. No costumes, no notes, no gimmicks, just straight-up raw truth! See the full rules and how it works on our Rules of the Road page.)

This month, our theme is “On the Edge”. We’re all about safer sex here at Smut Slam DC, but we can’t deny that sometimes our hottest encounters are the ones where we explored the farthest reaches of our fantasies. Let’s talk about your actual fetish edge play, or the time you almost got caught in public. Tell us about what edging did for your orgasms, or how your sweetie left you in suspension.

Your fabulous femme-cees are as always Smut Slam DC co-producers Mindi Mimosa and Diva Darling, joined by a panel of local celebrity judges, who want you to keep them on the edge of their seats.

Join us before the show to enjoy the luxurious Smut Slam Lounge, where you can sample delicious Asian small plates, enjoy our exclusive cocktail specials, and browse vintage erotica and collections of Fuckbucket confessions from past shows. Get swag, merch, and edutainment from our vendor and partner tables– including NEW Smut Slam DC merch!

As always, the Fuckbucket (where audience members can throw in anonymous confessions or questions) is generously sponsored by nJoy sex toys. We’ve got some fabulous storytelling prize packs on tap for you from our show sponsors, Lotus Blooms, GlydeAmerica and Überlube— and including the exclusive Butt Slam DC paddle, made by our newest sponsor Creamed and Sugared, that will ONLY ever be available by telling a prizewinning story.

21 venue, casual dress (or be as fabulous as you choose!)

Doors: 7:00pm (for the upstairs lounge; seating at 7:30 PM)
Show: 8:00pm

Time

(Wednesday) 7:00 pm - 11:00 pm

Location

Ten Tigers Parlour

3813 Georgia Avenue NW

Cost

$10 in advance, $15 at the door

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17oct7:00 pmAtmospherew/ deM atlaS, The Lioness, DJ Keezy7:00 pm 9:30 Club

18oct12:00 pmNo Spectators: Beyond the Renwick Walking Tour12:00 pm Renwick Gallery

18oct(oct 18)12:00 pm06nov(nov 6)3:00 amA Very Wizard Tavern12:00 pm - (november 6) 3:00 am Town Tavern

18oct6:00 pmMasego (First Show Sold Out! Second Show Added!)6:00 pm U Street Music Hall

18oct6:30 pmCHVRCHESw/ Lo Moon6:30 pm The Anthem

Event Details

Super Excellent Seats are non-transferable. The ID of the person attending must match the purchaser’s name, which will be printed on the ticket face.

Chvrches has partnered with PLUS1 so that $1 from every ticket will go to support Girls Rock! DC and their work empowering girls, trans and gender-diverse young people through music education and mentorship. www.girlsrockdc.org

If you love driving fast with the windows rolled down playing top 40 radio at full volume and you play in a band, you usually have one goal: get your songs out of your garage and into the worlds’ collective car speakers as soon as humanly possible. Lauren Mayberry, Iain Cook, and Martin Doherty certainly fit this bill. They unabashedly adore music of the wind-in-your-hair variety. And, of course, they play in a band, the Scottish synth pop group, CHVRCHES.

And yet … Since emerging in 2013 with the glistening brightness of their breakthrough single, “Recover,” CHVRCHES have always projected an insularity, a subtle but unmistakable wariness about leaning into their obvious Hit Song of the Summer-writing potential. At their core, CHVRCHES are true blue Glaswegian punks. They’ve wanted to protect themselves, and protect that undercurrent of melancholy that gives depth to their sunniness.

To this end, the band members have always kept their creative process close and tight. They’ve been diligent to the max about managing the way their band is portrayed. And, of course, they have historically produced every piece of music themselves, including their 2013 debut, The Bones of What You Believe, and 2015 follow-up, Every Open Eye. “Certainly not,” was their go-to response, Martin recalls laughing, when asked to consider collaboration. “We knew that if you get led down the wrong path it can completely derail your career.” But if there’s a theme in CHVRCHES’ world as they prepare to release their third record, Love Is Dead, it’s willful, determined openness, both ideologically – more on that in a minute – and in terms of actual creative process.

This time around, instead of Lauren disappearing for days at a time, the trio stayed in the same room even while Lauren was writing lyrics. As a result, the album “feels a lot more coherent,” she says. Lauren also consciously pulled from a different psychic well when writing those lyrics, one that’s less introspective and more expansive and imagistic. “I tried to write less about romantic love specifically,” she says. “And more about the overarching concept of love.” And, for the first time ever, CHVRCHES opened their proverbial doors to outside influence. The Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart served as the band’s de facto mentor, providing insight Lauren says “really pushed us to focus on the artistic integrity of the album and everything that surrounds it.” Steve Mac co-produced the soaring ode to hope, “Miracle.” And thanks to some extremely productive time spent in what Lauren calls his “Aladdin’s Cave,” Greg Kurstin (Adele, Sia) wound up co-producing eight of the record’s twelve tracks. “We had similar musical tastes and we clicked in the writing process pretty quickly,” Kurstin recalls. “I got to pull out all of the things I don’t have a chance to normally use.”

The result is the purest ever distillation of CHVRCHES’ signature pretty gloom. “It makes more sense than anything else we’ve made because it most accurately represents us,” says Martin. “We’ve always had this super difficult side to us – artistic and introspective and angry, but then we also fully embrace commercial music,” he continues. “When we talked about this album, before we even made it, we talked about it that way, we talked about there being two sides to the band. With Love Is Dead, we’ve broadened the appeal, but there are moments that are more difficult than anything we’ve ever done.”

This conscious move towards openness in the creative process reflects a bigger, deeper existential theme as well. “We live in a time where the death of empathy is pretty evident,” Lauren explains. “You turn on the news and see story after story about how selfish and unkind people are, but also stories of strength and resilience and resistance. How do we deal with both those things?” That question, of how to honor our justifiable despair about the state of the world, while moving towards hope and love, mirrors CHVRCHES’ sonic blend of dualities. As Lauren exhorts in “ii”, the instrumental / spoken word intro to album closer “Wonderland”:

Truth exists somewhere between the dark and the light

It’s that quest for balance that runs throughout Love Is Dead.

Lead single “Get Out” is a sprawling crescendo of heartbroken joy, and the album’s opening track, “Graffiti,” with it’s lilting syncopated backbeat follows suit. “Wrote our names along the bathroom walls, graffiti-ing our hearts across the stalls,” Lauren sings. “I’ve been waiting for my whole life to grow old and now we never will.” The song captures a sense of perspective on the passage of time. “Growing up and realizing things aren’t going to be the way you thought they would be,” the singer explains. “The feeling of Stand By Me, ‘I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, did you?’”

Then there’s the slinky “Deliverance,” which personifies that classic CHVRCHES blend of punk ethos with a pure pop sound. “You don’t hear people singing on the radio about the hypocrisy of religion,” says Iain, “but that’s what’s exciting about it. We were thinking about Like a Prayer era Madonna, and Nick Cave, and Depeche Mode’s Songs of Faith and Devotion.”

The band doesn’t consider their music expressly political, per se, but the urgent, brightly haunted “Graves,” with lyrics like “they’re leaving bodies in stairwells and washing up on the shore/you can look away while they’re dancing on our graves/if you don’t have a heart I can offer you mine,” feels abject and despairing yet joyful in a decidedly topical way. And on, “Miracle,” Mayberry questions “I feel like but I’m falling but I’m trying to fly, where does all the good go?”

Speaking of politics, the dreamy “Heaven/Hell,” with lyrics like, “Is it right if I’m a perfect actress/Playing the princess in distress?/Is it alright if I save myself and/If I clean up my own mess?/Is it enough yet, ‘cause I’ve had enough?” gets at an issue CHVRCHES have been dealing with since their very first Twitter follower: what it’s like to be a rock band with a female frontperson. From the jump, Lauren has been outspoken about the vitriolic sexism and misogyny she was expected to tolerate merely because she’s a female human being singing on a stage. Hers is a perspective that has found much greater support in this last year, which is great, obviously. “I think it’s healthy that it’s in the mainstream,” Martin says, “of course, but she was getting fucking slaughtered five years ago, for saying stuff that’s now everywhere I look. Lauren stood up against this kind of behavior on day one.”

And she paid a price. Unlike her bandmates, who, by the time CHVRCHES formed, had already logged a lot of years in other groups, Lauren’s entrée to the rock and roll life was more trial by fire. “I was 23 when I met Iain, 24 when we started this band and I’m thirty now,” she recalls. “I’ve had to grow up in front of people.” From the very beginning, “there was a lot of trepidation on my part,” she recalls. “As a woman in any industry but especially as a woman in the entertainment industry, I knew how people talk about you. How they perceive you. Even before the first record came out I could see all these monsters in the trees already. Some of those monsters turned out to be real. Some of them did not.

That’s a lot of what Love Is Dead is about: growing up, “coming to terms with the fact that there are great things in the world and there are awful things in the world and that you can’t get one without the other,” Lauren says. It’s that duality, again. “We’re fucked, the world is fucked,” Iain summarizes, with a smile. “But there’s an ellipses at the end. It’s Love Is Dead…. Like, how did we get to this point? And how do we move on from this point? It’s Love Is Dead, we’re fucked, what’s next?”

Time

(Thursday) 6:30 pm

Location

The Anthem

901 Wharf St SW Washington, DC, 20024

Cost

$41

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18oct6:45 pm8:00 pmEvolution In Warp Drive: The Science of Star Trek6:45 pm - 8:00 pm S. Dillon Ripley Center

18oct7:00 pm8:30 pmNewbies in the Kitchen: Eating Cooking Local!PRESENTED BY MIDCITY MADCRAFTERS 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm Miss Pixie's Furnishings & whatnot...

18oct7:00 pm9:00 pmFree Weekly Bingo w/ Union Market7:00 pm - 9:00 pm Union Market

18oct7:00 pmTank and the Bangas & Big FreediaNaughty Professor7:00 pm 9:30 Club

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Tank and the Bangas

Originating in New Orleans, Tank and The Bangas have all the qualities that relates them, to the city that birth them but a flair that separates them as well. Their performances range from being “One of the most energetic shows you’ll ever see” to “A gospel tent in Mississippi”. Rummaging through their sound like a thrift store hippie, you’ll find the Bangas to provoke a musical reference of Rhythmic Soul and Spoken word among other genres such as Rock, Gospel, Funk, and Folk. Combining the various musical techniques among the Bangas, coupled with the instilling play on lyrics from the lead vocalist; Tank and The Bangas have quilted a unique sound that singles them as one of the most distinctive groups to come out of New Orleans. The group has graced the cover of one of New Orleans most recognized magazines, “OffBeat” and recently won band of the year at the New Orleans Big Easy Awards. The group has opened for acts such as LiAnne LaHavas, PJ Morton, Galactic, Big Freedia, The Revivalist, and The Soul Rebels. Most recently the band was titled as the 2017 NPR Tiny Desk Contest winners.

Big Freedia

Big Freedia, known as the Queen of Bounce, is a New Orleans-based rapper and ambassador of Bounce music. After dominating the New Orleans club scene for over a decade, Big Freedia is now bringing the Bounce movement to a world-wide stage with her hit reality show, Big Freedia Bounces Back on Fuse TV in the US and on OUTtv in Europe, Canada, and South Africa. The weekly docu-series, now in its sixth season, follows the life of a choirboy turned Bounce rapper and remains the highest rated original series on Fuse.

In 2016, Freedia was featured on Beyoncé’s Grammy-winning single, “Formation.”

Freedia’s first LP, “Just Be Free” was praised by Rolling Stone as one of the ‘best electronic releases’ and was critically acclaimed in outlets such as Pitchfork, SPIN, USA Today, and Consequence of Sound. Beyond the Beyoncé collaboration, many artists have reached out to collaborate with Freedia, ranging from Sia, Elliphant, Diplo, The Postal Service, DJ Snake, Matt & Kim, Mannie Fresh, and Sylvan Esso.

Big Freedia continues to tour over a hundred dates a year with her legendary shake team, who are bring Bounce moves like “the twerk” (popularized by Miley Cyrus in 2013), “the shake” “the wiggle,” “the bend ova,” the “hands on the ground,” to audiences worldwide. Big Freedia is a consistent festival favorite, known to steal the show at Outside Lands, Fun Fun Fun Fest, Bonnaroo, FYF and many more.

In 2015, Big Freedia penned her first memoir, Big Freedia: God Save the Queen Diva! on Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster. The book was hailed in the press by outlets from Rolling Stone and Pitchfork to Out and Bust.

In 2012, Big Freedia made her television network debut on Jimmy Kimmel Live! She has also appeared on Last Call with Carson Daly, Watch What Happens Live, NPR’s All Things Considered, NPR’s Marketplace, Ridiculousness, and The Real. Her TV show received the GLAAD Media Award in 2014 and was nominated again for the award in 2015.

Big Freedia continues to release new singles and will releases her major label debut EP on Asylum Records in June of 2018.

Time

(Thursday) 7:00 pm

Location

9:30 Club

815 V ST NW, Washington, DC 20001

Cost

$25

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18oct10:00 pmMasego10:00 pm U Street Music Hall

19oct(oct 19)12:00 pm07nov(nov 7)3:00 amA Very Wizard Tavern12:00 pm - (november 7) 3:00 am Town Tavern

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