Travis Hayes
Vandella
This event is 21 and over
$12.00 – General Admission (Advance)
$14.00 – General Admission (Door)
*plus applicable service fees
Tickets available at The Independent box office (628 Divisadero, SF) with no service charge.
Travis Hayes isn’t the type to wear emotions on his sleeve. He saves that for his songs- brutally honest most of the time, and endearingly heartfelt all the time. Hayes continues the timeless tradition of soul-bearing songwriting to interpret our shared human experience into music.
Love, heartbreak, fading friendships, fraught relationships – they’re all expressed achingly through his impassioned voice and melodic guitar lines. Hayes echoes the earnestness of Springsteen, the pop sensibility of Petty, and the raw emotion of Ryan Adams.
July 2014 marked the release of Hayes’s debut album Young Daze. The album received critical acclaim from print and online media alike. The Deli Magazine praised Hayes’s ability to “…blend quintessential American music styles that nod to artists like Tom Petty and John Cougar Mellencamp, while creating his own spin on his ballads, bringing a fresh and modern sound…” Infectious Magazine declared, “Travis Hayes’s Young Daze will entrance you and prove to be the refreshing, crisp sound you’ve been looking for.”
March 2015 brought a new feel for Hayes with the release of his acoustic EP Love Songs, featuring Emily Whitehurst (Tsunami Bomb / Survival Guide). SF Weekly dubbed the release “a heartfelt EP of acoustic folk-pop.” San Francisco TV and print contributor Broke Ass Stuart suggested, “If you want your girlfriend to miss you while she’s on vacation send her Love Songs, sung by a vocal duo whose harmony sounds as natural together as it is brutal on the ol’ heart strings.”
While Young Daze was a coming-of-age tale, and Love Songs touched on matters of the heart, Travis Hayes’s sophomore LP Sleepless explores a darker reality. Hayes delves into the challenges that inevitably come with growing older- themes that keep him awake at night. Now accompanied by a full-time backing band, Hayes’s sonic arrangements are grander, his vision is greater, and his words don’t just ring now, they soar.
In his career, Hayes has shared the stage with acts such as Nathaniel Rateliff, Langhorne Slim and Chuck Ragan. In addition, he’s made appearances at San Francisco’s Noise Pop Festival, SXSW, Ocean Beach Music and Art Festival and embarked on many extensive tours around the United States. Simply put by Music Junkie Press, “If you are from the Bay Area and haven’t been to a Travis Hayes show, then you are missing out.”
The Berkeley, California-based singer-songwriter M. Lockwood Porter is part of a promising crop of up-and-coming Americana singer-songwriters. In the past three years, he has released two critically-acclaimed albums and performed all over the US, sharing the stage with acts like American Aquarium, David Wax Museum, Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires, Water Liars, Samantha Crain, David Ramirez, Aaron Lee Tasjan, and John Moreland. He has performed at festivals like Outside Lands, Noise Pop, Norman Music Festival, and CMJ. No Depression called Porter’s 2014 album 27 “a solid album worth your time, attention, and money.” In a review of 27, Americana UK said, “Take care with M. Lockwood Porter. He is an important singer-songwriter.”
Porter, who got his start in music playing in punk bands in Tulsa, Oklahoma when he was in high school, is resistant to simple categorization, though. Like Conor Oberst or Jeff Tweedy, his songs are equal parts traditional songcraft and indie rock attitude. “I get called an Americana singer, and I get why. But it’s a narrow label. I still have this punk rock point of view that, whenever I’m around a bunch of people that are doing something similar, makes me want to take a left turn.”
How To Dream Again – tracked live in three days with minimal overdubs – is one of those left turns. While Porter dabbled in lush country-rock and expansive power pop on 27, How To Dream Again sounds tougher and leaves more space. The band – consisting of Porter, Peter Labberton, Bevan Herbekian, and Jeff Hashfield, and John Calvin Abney – sounds tight and heavy, like Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers if they’d cut their teeth at CBGB. The acoustic songs are raw and haunting, recalling Springsteen’s Nebraska.