$8 in advance/$10 at the door
10pm showtime
21+
sponsored by Indeed Brewing & Radio K
We are the Willows:
We Are The Willows is an orchestral indie rock band based out of South Minneapolis. The 6-piece ensemble features songwriter/frontman Peter Miller’s unique countertenor voice and guitar, supported by Jeremiah Satterthwaite (guitar/banjo), Leah Ottman (violin/voice/keys), Hilary James (cello/voice/keys), Travis Collins (bass), and Josh McKay (drums). We Are The Willows craft dynamic, intimate songs with instruments and voices combining to create energetic rhythms and intricate melodies. Their heartfelt arrangements evoke shared nostalgic feelings of love and loss.
For We Are The Willows, the 4 years between 2013 and 2017 were busy. The sort of busy that makes memory a blur of impressions, half thoughts and whatever our internet feeds tell us had been happening. We Are The Willows endeavored to make a splash in the music world with a dense, two part, 20 song concept album entitled, Picture (Portrait), released in 2014 and 2016 respectively. The album garnered praise from NPR, the BBC, Buzzfeed, PASTE magazine, Noisey, The Brooklyn Vegan and offered the band an on ramp to showcasing at SXSW, Treefort Music Fest, along with opening for the likes of Blitzen Trapper, S. Carey, PHOX and Matt Pond PA. On top of all of this, the band toured rigorously throughout the greater midwest playing clubs, colleges, bars, theaters, coffee shops, and people’s homes.
In the Summer of 2017, Mike Noyce (Bon Iver, Tallest Man on Earth, S. Carey) offered his engineering and production services to the band. They met Mike at April Base Studio, built by Justin Vernon and co. in Fall Creek, WI to record The Prettiest Please. The weekend in the studio was one of rejuvenation. Before this, the band had only recorded in basements, living rooms and church sanctuaries on shoestring-budget-recording-gear, with engineering and production duties handled by singer and principal songwriter Peter M and guitar player Jeremiah Satterthwaite. Noyce gave the band an opportunity to focus, feel and perform. April Base provided satiation for every creative compulsion. When the weekend was over, We Are The Willows was a new band and the song might just be proof of that.
Dwynell Roland:
Dwynell was born and raised in North Minneapolis, and has been rapping since the age of 13. During that time when he first started writing, he was part of a collective called TCB (Twin City Boyz). His time with the TCB was spent largely perfecting his craft of freestyling, and honing his knack for writing songs with a stylistic flair similar to T3 of Slum Village or Schoolboy Q, perfecting his style while maintaining a writing style similar to Joe Budden. This is mostly shown when he has dropped various freeverses via his YouTube page, showing his effervescence over such beats as “Stay Schemin’” and “Shine Blockas”.
Dwynell’s experience doing recorded material was on his first mixtape, Upside, which has shown the strides he’s made to perfect his songwriting craft, all the while making sure his style was at the forefront, with almost a drawl and depth to his voice. Dwynell released his debut EP, Make Due in October of 2012, and then started subsequent work on writing material for his album, called 92 and Roland, which continues to show vast improvement from his days in his teens, and freely talking about topics of partying and reflection, delivering feel-good jams that leave a listener with no choice but to nod and enjoy the various personas that Dwynell possesses.
With the release of his Factors EP in August 2014, Dwynell started to explore more serious subject matter, such as on the track “She” about the quest for love gone awry, and that led him to new territory, such as garnering an opening spot on Prof Outdoors in 2016. Shortly after his performance, he released a new project called “The Popular Nobody,” a project that allowed Dwynell to crank the volume up to 11 and show why he is one of the standouts of the new crop of rappers hailing from Minneapolis.