Carbon Leaf with special guests Gaelic Mishap

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Carbon Leaf with special guests Gaelic Mishap
March 17 @ 7:00 pm - 11:00 pm

Sun Scape Live presents Carbon Leaf with special guests Gaelic Mishap on St Patrick’s Day Friday March 17th from 7:00 until 11:00pm at State Fare. This is a Free event and all ages show! Doors at 6:00.
**We now have a limited number of V.I.P. tickets available for this event! For more information please visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/carbon-leaf-vip-tickets-tickets-570938942747
Art work by Ian Herrick. Visit http://www.ianherrickartist.com/
“It felt so good to get back on the road again in 2021. It was a huge relief, with safety on everyone’s minds,to know that the efforts were paying off,” says Carbon Leaf frontman Barry Privett.
“The systems worked very well we were able to connect through live music once again. When we got home in December, we went right to work writing and recording. We wanted this album to have a little bit more fun than our 2021 release, Gathering 2: The Hunting Ground. This new album will be expanding that neighborhood, musing on space and time, and the brief moment we get to experience it as Earthlings, if you will.”
The ongoing Gathering series
“It’s a call to look inwards and find what matters, an invitation to reach out and embrace the gifts of human connection.” Privett says.
That’s no mean feat given the deep divisions that havedefined much of the past few years of American life, but Carbon Leaf has always punched above their weight, defying the odds at every turn and redefining what’s possible for a modern indie band in the process.The group’s extraordinary new mini-album, Gathering 2: The Hunting Ground, is no exception. Recorded at the band’s own studio in Richmond, VA, the collection marks the second installment of the group’s four-part Gathe
“One of the big questions we found ourselves grappling with as a band was, ‘How do you actually make any kind of a difference in society today?’” says Privett. “And I don’t think you can do that without first looking inwards—to yourself, your family, your friends—and figuring out what your values truly are.”
Anyone who’s caught a Carbon Leaf show over the past three decades probably has a pretty good idea just what those values are: brotherhood, commitment,empathy, integrity, self-reliance. Founded at Randolph-Macon College in 1992, the group evolved from a houseparty cover band into something far more profound after graduation, when they moved to Richmond and made the shift to original music. The band’s first three albums helped build a devoted cult following, but it was 2001’s Echo Echo that truly br
“The initial idea for these Gathering albums was to get a bunch of our musical friends together in the studio for a weekend and make something really communal and collaborative,” explains Privett. “We had some of our pals from We Banjo 3 join in on Volume 1, but for the second installment we decided to strike out on our own because the songs just felt more personal andintrospective.”
Though Carbon Leaf had traditionally embraced a wall of sound approach in the studio, this time around they went back to the basics, focusing on raw, acoustic arrangements that placed the storytelling front and center. With guitarist Terry Clark handling engineering duties, the band—Privett, Clark, stringed instrument wizard Carter Gravatt, bassist Jon Markel, and drummer Jesse Humphrey—captured performances on and off over the course of roughly six months, experimenting with a wide variety of instruments and mic placements to generate a series of immersive, transportive sonic landscapes.
“Space was a big thing for us when we were making these recordings,” says Clark. “Moving the microphones further away so we could really capture the room and the air helped add lot of the character and dimensionthese songs needed.”
While some of the tracks here began life as instrumental demos from Gravatt, others first took shape as a capella lyrical or melodic ideas from Privett. Regardless of where each tune began, though, the finished product would inevitably wind up bearing theunmistakable fingerprints of all five bandmates, whose infectious chemistry consistently yields more than the sum of its parts.
“We like to take a world-building approach in the studio,” says Privett. “We’ll stack things up and layer them on top of each other until we’ve got something that sounds way beyond just five guys in a room together.”
That alchemy is obvious from the outset on The Hunting Ground, which opens with the churning “Everything’s Alright Mama.” Mixing gritty Appalachian folk with lilting Celtic influences, the track begins with both feet on the ground and builds into a soaring work of bittersweet beauty, balancing the mundane and the magical in equal measure as it reaches out into the void for connection. Like much of the album, it’s a bright, uptempo tune, but dig beneath the surface and you’ll find an underlying sense of sadness that permeates the often-impressionistic
“The idea of the hunting ground is that it’s this place where you’re searching for something out in the great wild unknown,” says Privett. ”How do you process grief? How do you fix your soul in the face of losing someone you care about? How do you carry on when life doesn’t go the way you’d planned?”
In the end, of course, there are no easy answers to these questions, and that’s precisely the point. The hunt is an endless one, but it doesn’t need to be lonely.We’re all in the search together, and after more than a year of distance and isolation, it’s hard to think of anything we need more than a good old fashioned gathering.