Mappa Mundi + Tim Haufe + Comic Tales of Tragic Heartbreak @ The Way Station

8pm- Mappa Mundi
Genre: Alt-folk/chamber-pop
For fans of: The Decemberists, Bon Iver, The Lumineers, Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, Noah and the Whale, Stornoway, Dry the River, Lord Huron

Founded by multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Adam Levine, Mappa Mundi blends jangly folk, noisy art-rock, and sweet chamber music into something at once Old World and New.

“In a word: monumental.” - The Aquarian Weekly

“A sumptuous set of songs… sublime.” - Blurt Magazine

“…new music with depth and relevance…” - Rust Magazine

http://www.mappamundiband.com/
http://mappamundi.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/mappamundi
https://twitter.com/mappamundi

9pm- Tim Haufe
Genre: Indie/Folk/Acoustic
For fans of: Elliott Smith, Jeff Buckley, Daniel Rossen, Stevie Wonder

Tim Haufe is a songwriter and musician who grew up in Poughkeepsie, NY. His music is volatile, desperate, beautiful, dynamic, and full of hope. Haufe currently lives in New York, where he is striving to establish for his music the grand reputation that it deserves.

“Tim has all the qualities one looks for in a live performance: He is in tune with the elasticity of the crowd. I could feel myself being drawn closer and closer to the music as the song went on.” - Daniel Dissinger, InStereoPress

www.timhaufe.com
timhaufe.bandcamp.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3qfi82iBb0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9to2sEdoqMg

10pm- Comic Tales of Tragic Heartbreak
"You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life.”

So said Sherwood Anderson in his great book, Winesburg, Ohio. Comic Tales of Tragic Heartbreak knows all about accidents. Of birth. Of place and strange times. Of music heard through screen windows in summer, of lonely faces in discos while blizzards raged outside in the Northern night.

What’s a young criminal to do? Read every book he can get his hands on, obsess over record club 45s, play the theme song to MASH over and over on a rented trumpet, lose a thousand fistfights till he finally wins one. Ride a stolen bike, a bus, a train, get out.

Years later, redemption at last. Robert Whaley is just about where he should be. Compared to everyone from David Byrne to Leonard Cohen, he’s been welcoming audiences into a private world of enchantment and debauchery, and oh the influences are clear: Anderson (words and emotions), Fossee (dance and controlled hysteria), poetry (Artaud and
O’Hara).

Whaley had a lot of practice riding the line between rock n’ roll, performance art, and stand up comedy as the front man for The Niagaras, a legendary force of Manhattan’s live music scene of 80s and 90s, when a wild front man could dance on bar tops and swing from the
rafters without getting banned, except for when he was:

“Lunacy? Spectacle? And music too??”- Rene Chun, New York Times

No wonder the attraction included a “celebrity” following – everyone from Ethan Hawke to Kevin Spacey to Gwyneth Paltrow to the good people in Anthrax.

As a songwriter, Whaley has covered a lot of ground and has shown range through a number of outlets. He cowrote and recorded the original score for the feature film, Joe the King, starring Val Kilmer, and has also written for the stage –his rock musical Wrong Way Up ran off-Broadway at NYC’s Zipper Theater. He is currently working with playwright Matthew Freeman on a musical adaptation of the great 1908 novel, Buried Alive – now titled Selling Sacred Objects.

Meat Market Lullaby, the second album from Comic Tales of Tragic Heartbreak, reflects an obsession with pre-1974 soul, filled with nuance and tender bitter sweetness. Jazz pianist Mara Rosenbloom sets the tone with her loose/attacking, touch on grand piano and Rhodes. Pete O’Connell lends a sophisticated sense of drive and counterpoint as both bassist and co-arranger. Whaley’s long-time collaborator, lead guitarist and singer, Tony Grimaldi, shines with masterful harmonies and chunky guitar lines. Chris Schultz, percussionist with Blue Man Group, shimmers, cascades and of course, rocks.

Recorded live in the studio with a minimum of overdubs, a maximum of misfit charm, and this: “Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.” (Sherwood Anderson, again.)

www.comictalesoftragicheartbreak.com