On Wednesday, May 12. the CCPA and KRVM welcome back Martin Sexton with special guests the Ryan Montbleau Band.
Martin Sexton's spring and summer tour dates have just been announced and include several highlights: appearances at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and Bonnaroo, a run of dates supporting the Dave Matthews Band, plus headline shows at DC's 930 Club, New York's Nokia Theatre, Chicago's Park West, Los Angeles' House of Blues, San Francisco's The Fillmore, and his first WOW Hall performance since 2007. As he likes to put it, I sing for free, man. I get paid to travel.
Martin is touring in support of Sugarcoating. Sexton's new studio album, released April 6, finds this one-of-a-kind writer/artist doing what he does best: locating larger truths within the specific details of the life he's living. I write from personal experience - my own hang-ups and quirks, good times and bad times, he acknowledges. That keeps it real.
The title song, disturbing in its theme and audacious in its presentation, takes keeping it real to another level entirely. It's an unsettling look at post 9/11 reality, encapsulated in the lines, I wonder why nobody wonders why/with all the sweet sweet sweet sugarcoating/the nightly news gone entertainment biz/and the politicians out showboatin'/One day somebody tell it like it is. The fact that this urgent message is embedded in a danceable, happy-go-lucky arrangement complete with backing vocals by what Sexton calls his cowboy trio, only serves to deepen the song's impact.
Sexton thinks of Sugarcoating not as a protest song but as a questioning song - what's up with that? The last couple of years have been an awakening for me about how the world seems to work and not work. I'm concerned, because I feel since 9/11 the world has gone downhill, our rights are going out the window and the powers that be continue to usurp our freedom under the guise of safety. My music has always been more about inspiration and entertainment, but this time I felt the need to toss some awareness into the mix.
The Syracuse-born, western Mass.-based artist describes Sugarcoating as, a photo album filled with snapshots of my family and friends. The new release was tracked live off the floor in seven days with a remarkably cohesive studio band.
Each song is so stylistically different from the next, says Sexton, I've always preferred records that range, sort of like the White Album from Rocky Raccoon' to Revolution No. 9'. At one time industry types tried to convince me to stick to one genre, but it was like wearing a suit that didn't fit. I recorded this album with no rehearsals, no preproduction, using all vintage gear from what went into the mics to what came out onto the analog tape. The fellas and I gathered around the big kitchen table at the studio, I'd play them the song, then we'd go in and start tracking. We nailed every one of them in four or five takes at most, and a couple are take ones. I like making records like the old jazz guys did -- they just showed up and worked it out.
In the romp Boom Sh-Boom, set in the Fez -- a club in New York's East Village, Sexton extols the virtues of dancing over those of downing brewskis. That's a true story, blow for blow, he says. I met my future wife there while playing a gig at the Fez in the late '90s. She offered me a Red Stripe, and I'm a recovering alcoholic, so I said 'No thanks,' and the rest is history.
It's Sexton's uncanny ability to connect the personal to the universal via songs like these -- mating heartfelt, unflinchingly candid lyrics with genre-spanning performances -- that has earned him such a devoted following among fans and critics alike. The New York Times' Jon Pareles wrote that the artist, jumps beyond standard fare on the strength of his voice, a blue-eyed soul man's supple instrument . . . his unpretentious heartiness helps him focus on every soul singer's goal: to amplify the sound of the ordinary heart.
With Sugarcoating, Sexton may well have made his defining record. It's an unquestionable high point for this modern-day troubadour who oversees his own label KTR and derives great satisfaction from livin' the life he's made for himself. These are the fruits of a combination of rarefied talent, fierce determination and work.
Ryan Montbleau is a Boston-based soul singer touring in support of his new album, Patience on Friday. The singer-guitarist and his band -- drummer James P. Cohen, keyboardist Jason Cohen, bassist Matt Gianarros and violist Laurence Scudder -- will play an opening set and then back Martin Sexton the rest of the evening.
Since releasing their debut album, One Fine Color, in 2006, the Ryan Montbleau Band has been playing more than 200 dates a year, weaving a tapestry of folk, blues, rock-steady, country, cocktail music, rock, gypsy jazz and psychedelia that's exciting, elegant and sometimes even elegiac.
Says Montbleau, My favorite thing in the world is looking out from the stage and seeing smiling faces.
Tickets are $20 in advance, $22 at the door, and $25 for front of house reserved seating. Doors open at 7:00 pm and showtime is 8:00.
SHOWTIME: 8:00 PM, PRICE: $20 Advance, $22 Door, $25 Reserved Seating. 
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