june 25
indigo girls • neko case

dj Lady ryan

INDIGO GIRLS

NEKO CASE

SUNDAY JUNE 25 @ 2PM

STERN GROVE FESTIVAL

DOORS AT 12PM

WHAT TO KNOW & WHERE TO GO

Know Before You Grove
19th Ave. & Sloat Blvd., SF

Entry into Stern Grove Festival is first-come-first-served and reservations do not guarantee entry. If the venue reaches capacity, patrons will be directed to an overflow area with obstructed view and sound. Use Mixhalo for better sound experience!

Watch it live on KBCW 44 Channel 12

Live Stream it Here

 

RESERVATIONS INFORMATION

  • Reservations open on Thur. May 25 @ 2pm

  • Reservations are required but don't guarantee entry. Entry is on a first-come, first-served basis

  • Only reserve FREE tickets from our official Eventbrite pages. Stern Grove Festival reserves the right to refuse entry for tickets purchased from un-authorized 3rd party resellers (individuals or brokers). 

  • Four Reservation Limit per person

  • Senior and ADA seating is available on a first come first served basis once on site and is available for 1 senior and 1 guest

  • Children 2 yrs + require a reservation

  • Doors open at 12 noon

  • Concert starts at 2pm

  • Enter through designated entrances only:
    #1. 19th & Sloat
    #2. Vale Ave.
    #3. 23rd & Wawona

  • You may bring your own food and beverages


indigo girls with full band

 

Released in 1989, Indigo Girls' eponymous major label debut sold over two million copies under the power of singles “Closer to Fine” and “Kid Fears” and turned Indigo Girls into one of the most successful folk duos in history. Over a thirty-five-year career that began in clubs around their native Atlanta, Georgia, the multi-Grammy-winning duo of Emily Saliers and Amy Ray has recorded sixteen studio albums, sold over 15 million records, and built a dedicated, enduring following across the globe. Rolling Stone describes them as the “ideal duet partners.” Committed and uncompromising activists, they work on issues like immigration reform (El Refugio), LGBTQ advocacy, education (Imagination Library), death penalty reform, and Native American rights. They are co-founders of Honor the Earth, a non-profit dedicated to the survival of sustainable Native communities, Indigenous environmental justice, and green energy solutions. 


Their latest record, Look Long is a stirring and eclectic collection of songs that finds the duo of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers reunited in the studio with their strongest backing band to date. “We joke about being old, but what is old when it comes to music? We’re still a bar band at heart,” says Saliers. “While our lyrics and writing approach may change, our passion for music feels the same as it did when we were 25-years-old.” “As time has gone on, our audience has become more expansive and diverse, giving me a sense of joy,” she adds. To hear those collective voices raise into one, singing along and overpowering the band itself, one realizes the importance Indigo Girls’ music has in this moment. In our often-terrifying present, we are all in search of a daily refuge, a stolen hour or two, to engage with something that brings us joy, perspective, or maybe just calm. As one bar band once put it, “We go to the doctor, we go to the mountains…we go to the Bible, we go through the work out.” For millions, they go to Indigo Girls. On Look Long they’ll find a creative partnership certain of its bearings, forging a way forward.


neko case

Neko Case steps out, cutting the sky and singing the stars, spinning fury and mercy as she goes. She loves the world and wears her heart on her sleeve, but she might eat it before you get to thinking it belongs to you.

Wild Creatures pulls together some high points of feral joy from twenty-one years of solo work by Neko Case. The Virginian marked Neko’s debut as a solo artist in 1997. She delved into darkness in 2000 with Furnace Room Lullaby, scrawled Blacklisted in 2004 and recorded The Tigers Have Spoken live the same year. In 2006, she dreamed Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, and in 2009 unleashed Middle Cyclone. She plumbed her own life in 2013 for The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You, and raised hell in 2018 with Hell-On. Now in her third decade of recording under her own name, she’s just getting started.

Is there another songwriter so fearless and inventive?  Bending decades of pop music into new shapes, she wields her voice like a kiss and her metaphors like a baseball bat. She has cast the fishing net of her career wide—from Seattle and Vancouver to Chicago and Stockholm, setting up her home base on a farm in New England. 

Gathering power year after year, Neko sings with the fierce abandon of a newborn infant crying in a basket in the woods. Since escaping the labels of country and Americana, the gorgeous train-whistle vocals of her early career sit submerged in her later style, where their ghost can appear any minute. When her voice jumps an octave, it’s almost visible, like sparks at night. “I never knew where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do with my voice,” she says, “but I just wanted to do it so bad.”

The world tends to love women singer-songwriters most when they’re wounded and helpless. Neko’s music spans a broader spectrum, from longing to malice. Her lyrics evoke worlds, imagining a woman pilot ready to die, a serial killer, a murdered child, and a tornado, just for starters. Is there any perspective she can’t write a song from or about? “I am a man,” she sings. “I am the man in the fucking moon.”

The Earth, too, and nature itself are wonders for her, from the dangerous attention of dandy wolves to a slaughtered tiger and birds frying on a wire. The world is dear to her, but there’s a lot happening in it that shouldn’t. It’s not her job to comfort you.

You might try to come away from a Neko Case tune without a head full of images—but it’s impossible. Still, her songs won’t tell the whole story, rarely offering a panoramic view or a chronology. Instead, she offers up a series of snapshots, as if from a crime scene, and leaves the audience space to inhabit the closets and cathedrals she’s built.

Neko seems to live to bend the shape of the melodies she writes. Listeners might feel the music going in unexpected directions, as she looks for the note that will negotiate a truce to fuse it to her lyrics. It’s not that you can’t find a verse-chorus-verse structure in a Neko song. But you’re just as likely to find any chorus you hitch a ride with going off a cliff, or to hear a hook you think might be the chorus, only to watch it disappear. 

Neko Case songs often exist with distinct sections that recall symphonies. Changing from ballads or waltz time to a rock beat and back, the elements sometimes seem wired together to make an improvised explosive device.

Talking about inspirations, she’s as likely to mention Queen as Patsy Cline. Her work covers a big canvas, including collaborations with dozens of musicians over the years (Paul Rigby, Calexico, and an assorted set of sidemen known as “her boyfriends,” just to name a few). 

In studio, Neko obsesses over sound. Always involved with how her albums were recorded, she’s seized and embraced the role of producer. Standing halfway up a half-built stairway, she hammers nails into place as she goes along. Despite blowing every deadline she’s ever been given, Neko feels in her bones when a song or a project is done. 

“Music is so weird,” she says, “because you never arrive where you’re going.” If her career were mapped, it might be a choose-your-own-adventure book. She hasn’t masterminded each album with some absolute endpoint in mind. “I’ve never been afraid to ask for help. I’m able to trust myself in the moments where I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Neko insists on being larger than the narrow space that the world allocates to women. But don’t tell her what kind of feminist she’s supposed to be. There’s a famous dementia test in which you look at the pictures of an elephant or a giraffe and name them. Neko Case is the opposite of that. What if, by letting everything out of these cages, by taking the labels off living things, we had to encounter the world as it really is? The wild things, the lost things, the things that scare you, and the things that you love—what if it turns out all that is really home? What if, by writing about that, you could reinvent the universe?

What if some wild creature drags you out to the woods, but the woods begin to become the whole world, and your earlier home, still visible in the distance, suddenly seems less interesting than where you are now? You might be in the middle of a Neko Case song. 

She’s doing it on her own terms, but the legacy she’s building is one that can stand up to music made by any other solo artist in her lifetime. Don’t look away; you never know what might happen. “I’m just trying,” she says, “to be myself as hard as I can.”


 

CONCERT SPONSORED BY


SEASON SPONSORS


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DJ LADY RYAN

In her 15th year, LadyRyan is a Bay area favorite —inspiring a sense of safety, joy, and belonging as a spiritual conductor and dedicated professional. Her music and voice have been riding the wave of partygoers from coast to coast.​

Her passion for music started at an early age singing in her church choir at 6, sampling and making beats at 20, and ultimately tapping into her true passion buying her first set of turntables at 23.

A deep range of knowledge of multiple genres of music balanced with the right touch of nostalgia makes her ability to conduct high vibrations a sure shot! 

LadyRyan has played and opened up with artists such as George Clinton, Journey, Erykah Badu, Anderson Paak and many more!

In 2011, LadyRyan co-founded SOULOVELY, creating space for QTBIPOC community and packing in hundreds of people at one of the best seasonal outdoor monthly parties nine years strong.

LadyRyan has held long-standing residencies at some of East Bay's most popular clubs and breweries. In 2016 LadyRyan was awarded East Bay Express, Best of the East Bay, Winner 2016 Readers Choice.

​She is currently resident DJ for the Golden State Warriors, and is a radio host and DJ Wednesday nights on 91.7 KALW.

 
 
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