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Event
Special Valentine's Day Concert @ Wolf House featuring David Huckfelt of The Pines
Join us for a special Valentine's Day concert featuring the music of David Huckfelt of The Pines.
Doors at 7:30
Music at 8
Tickets are $20 advanced, $25 at the door
Light snacks will be provided. Wine, beer and non-alcoholic beverages can be purchased at the cash bar.
In the fall of 2018, David Huckfelt left behind the familiarthe comfort of his home in Minneapolis; the camaraderie of his critically acclaimed band, The Pines; the luxuries of heat, hot water, and electricityand relocated to Isle Royale, Americas most remote and least visited national park in mighty Lake Superior. Six hours by boat off the Michigan coast, Isle Royale is the largest island in the worlds largest freshwater lake, an isolated stretch of wilderness seemingly forgotten by the 20th century (to say nothing of the 21st). There, as an Artist In Residence selected by the National Park Service, Huckfelt spent ten hours a day for two straight weeks writing in solitude, channeling the mysterious and lonesome islands spirits into his stunning debut solo album, Stranger Angels.
The island is surrounded by 300 smaller islands, decrepit lighthouses and abandoned mines, lined with shipwrecks, ghosts, and the stories of the northern Ojibway, fisherman, and early settlers, Huckfelt reflects. I brought a mountain of notebooks and poetry and history books with me, says Huckfelt, and for the first time in nearly a decade, I found the solitude, depth, range, danger, beauty, and inspiration to go all kinds of places in my writing that I hadn't had the space to visit before. With a sense of place so strong, it was less like an anchor and more like a launching pad to free up and access all kinds of places from throughout my life. Its easy to travel anywhere in your mind in that kind of solitude, your whole experience rises up from the deep.
Indeed, the music is both transportive and reflective, focused inwards even as it draws on an abundance of outside influence. Hypnotic banjo and gentle acoustic guitar meet trippy public domain samples and shimmering soundscapes underneath Huckfelts stark, raw vocals as he wrestles with questions of fate and faith, responsibility and independence, connection and loss. A thread of deep ecology runs through these songs, but not the cute bumper sticker kind, the gritty, what-comes-next-if-we-dont-change-our-ways kind. Isle Royale used to have fifty wolves in five packs Huckfelt says, now theres only one left. Cycles are cycles but its the height of pride to think were (humans) arent the major player. The title track Stranger Angels brings this point home strongest, with the narrator longing for a place where (he) wont make the greedy richer, and the fierce grip of climate change manifests in lyrics like Wild mustangs starve in the hills outside Las Vegas and the West is burning like a lake of fire.
But above and beyond conservation, Stranger Angels is a record about thin places, those spiritually charged places where heaven and earth seem to meet and the veil between the world we see and the mystical world beyond becomes transparent. On the rollicking blues-carnival track As Below, So Above Huckfelt pays touching to tribute to his late grandmother who helped raise him in Iowa, not by writing about her, but to her, as a defiant elegy against death. A former theology student who once wrote and preached sermons in Cook County Jail in Chicago, Huckfelt has gone through the fire of the niceties and dogma of heaven and god and come out the other end with a worldview fiercely present, concrete and expansive. Stranger Angels as a title, to me, has a thousand references to whats left after life and death and experience and loss and love burns off all the easy answers says Huckfelt. The idea of god or spirit being hidden under the opposite of what we think we know, of ancestors and spirits visiting us, screaming in our ears all day long, but we miss it because its different, stranger than we expected And the kindness we give and receive from strangers, the least, last and lost among us. Our cities are overflowing with strange angels, its such a mistake when we think we know which or who can offer us something, and which cant. Every spirit has something to give. Then, when I saw the night camera footage of the moose and wolves on Isle Royale, dancing in the moonlight and gracing the forest with their presence, I thought stranger angels indeed.
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Locationbella luna studios at the Wolf House (View)
3359 Tyler Street NE
Minneapolis, MN 55418
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: Yes! |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: No |
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