Nikki Morgan • Johanna Rose LIVE on vimeo.com/cactusclubmke
Tue 07/14/20
7:00PM
All Ages
music
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Nikki Morgan
(Wilkes County, NC)
Genre: Americana
As the daughter of a minister and kin to a lot of church folk Nikki grew up listening to traditional gospel/christian music and spent much of her grade school days involved in school band playing clarinet and oboe. But, despite her early exposure to music, it wasn’t until the tender age of 28 when she finally began to start making music of her own.
Nikki was born and raised in North Carolina but Chicago is where she found her first home as a performer and songwriter. Starting out in the open mic scene it didn’t take long for her to garner local support and make her way to some great stages around the midwest: opening for acts such as Jaime Wyatt, Caroline Spence, Boo Ray, and Sean Watkins.
She is a former winner of the awarded Uncommon Ground Songwriting competition; she has been voted as a ‘Judge’s Pick’ in the Nashville Rising Song contest, and recently had her single Love.Save.Me make it to the semi-final round of the International Songwriting Competition.
Nikki finds a way to combine captivating melodies and insightful lyrics with a voice full of raw passion. Her music is unapologetic in it efforts to grapple with real life; and yet elegantly embodies the essence of her “Carolina Soul”.
Johanna Rose
(Milwaukee, WI)
Genre: Americana
Member of Nickel&Rose and B8R; Founder of Riverwest Femme Fest
Johanna Rose releases a 5 track EP, can’t love you from the ground, an American folk-inspired ode to their life in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.
When the loons leave the lake and the world freezes over, all you’re left with is hard work, hopes and dreams. With these companions, in their little house on the side of the mountain, Rose huddled around the wood stove with their guitar and began drafting the songs in can’t love you from the ground. Rose explores the heights and gullies of surviving a disparate late capitalist world, in arguably one of the most beautiful places on earth. Can’t love you from the ground borrows its name from a lyric in the second song, Carhartt Angel, a blue collar boot stomper about a back breaking job that keeps the lights on for us all. Resonator guitar, upright bass, bowed fiddle, and pedal steel weave their way through can’t love you from the ground while Rose lyrically encapsulates mountain life in a storied folk and country tradition.
Like the late, great, Blaze Foley, Rose lives in a treehouse, where they wrote and largely recorded the EP. Living in a treehouse is not just a realized childhood dream, but a necessity in a state that, like many, faces a severe housing shortage. Rose started building the treehouse in 2020 when their life as a touring musician with Nickel&Rose came to a screeching halt, but it wasn’t until late 2021 that they braved their first winter in the treehouse and can’t love you from the ground was unearthed.
“Anyone who enjoys delving into, as Greil Marcus called it, old weird America, would be well advised to have a listen to this five song EP from Johanna Rose which is rooted in the dirt and air which swirls around the foundations of what we call Americana. The songs sound as old as the hills with resonator guitar and plaintive pedal steel adding to the patina yet they come across as fresh as a daisy.”
– Paul Kerr, Americana UK