Brennan Wedl • Max & The Fellow Travelers • Alewives
Thu 02/27/25
6:30PM
All Ages
music
$12 ADV // $15 DOS
Show Lineup
Brennan Wedl
(Nashville, Tennessee)
Genre: Alternative, Indie Rock
Brennan Wedl documents those dizzying years spent in the world of ‘twenty-something’. Her radically unvarnished accounts detail an expansive universe that interweaves the everyday with scenes that might include catholic church camps, queer awakenings, one-night stands, or collapsed ‘forever’ relationships. The result? An eminently relatable catalog of moments when profound realizations arrive unexpectedly.
While she has been steadily releasing poignant dispatches as a solo artist since 2016, in 2024 she takes a striking step forward with a new series of singles. These recordings capture Wedl at her most unbounded and creatively impulsive; delivering sweetly lilting country one minute, and crashing rock the next, ringing out with jangling brightness at times and introspective in hushed acoustic guitar picking elsewhere.
This impulsiveness is something that Wedl wrestles with daily. Much of her material is indirectly inspired by her quest to live cleanly after the realization that she couldn’t live the life she wanted when drugs and alcohol were involved. However, in a move that is definitive of her approach, she explodes this specific experience into an allegory of life at large. Central is her tug of war between moderation and hedonism. A battle that she may, in any instant, apply to intoxicants, relationships, spirituality, sexual liberty, and beyond. The bubbling undercurrent throughout is a commitment to find comfort in restraint.
Wedl’s knack for encapsulating the moment has been apparent since co-founding the teen Boston band Dazey & The Scouts in 2017 and through their viral resurgence in 2020 as a new audience found themselves drawn to the allure of their self-described “hormonal freak show”. As she heads into 2024 her newest compositions prove that she remains viscerally attached to her emotional core and an acutely gifted narrator of life’s highs and lows.
Fellow Travelers
(Milwaukee)
Genre: Country-Rock, Folk-Rock, Indie Rock
There’s a type of band that doesn’t just play songs — they collect them, test-drive them, stretch them, condense them, and send them back out however they’re meant to be. Fellow Travelers belong in that category.
At the heart of it all is Max Niemann: armed with a six-string guitar, a harmonica rack, and a catalog of songs that feel lived-in – whether it’s a front porch blues or a sprawling piece of electric alchemy.
Around Niemann’s songs, the band builds a sound that can lean rustic or exploratory. Organ lines shimmer, fiddle and pedal steel soar over guitars braided together in ragged, interlocking patterns just above a rhythm section that might swing, shuffle, or hit a wide-open drive. There’s an emphasis on feel over flash, and while any member might occasionally hit the gas, the collective momentum is held above all.
Niemann’s lyrics hold tight to a timeless human experience— broken-down characters, doubts, responsibilities— but they’re carried by dynamic arrangements. Old-time chord changes collide with art rock tension; a lone fiddle drifts over krautrock-inspired rhythms. It’s music that honors the lineage of American roots while insisting that there’s more roads for it to wander down.
Fellow Travelers aren’t trying to revive anything, they’d rather chase the same spirit that animated their mentors – drawing from deep wells and crossing borders in the meantime.