Suitcase of Dreams

Irish-born, folk & country music singer, songwriter and guitarist, Owen Moore is a very familiar face in country music venues and folk clubs around the south coast of England.

An accomplished multi-instrumentalist, Milan often jokes that he first moved to Nashville in 1999 because he “heard they were running out of guitar players,” but with light speed picking and his trusty tenor voice, he has built a reputation as a first call sideman and collaborator. Traveling the world, Milan has made appearances at venues ranging from Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheater to Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace in Bakersfield, California, and from the Grand Ole Opry to Symphony Hall with the Boston Pops Orchestra.

Artist, tinkerer, tunesmith, swamp Yankee, Matt Lorenz is a one-man salvage specialist singing into the hollow of a Dumpster guitar, slipping a broken bottleneck onto the slide finger, railing on a box of twisted forks and bones, rocking till every sound is ragged at its edges, till the house is singing back. From the salvaged sounds of American juke joints, back porches, honky tonks and rock clubs, The Suitcase Junket conjures an entirely new sound on his essential rock collection, Pile Driver.The Suitcase Junket is Matt Lorenz: artist, tinkerer, swamp yankee, one-man band. His is the road-worn voice rising over the grind of a tube-amped dumpster guitar, and the wild double pitches of throat singing. From The Suitcase Junket's penchant for thrift and ingenuity comes the full-length album his debut at Signature Sounds of original rock anthems, mountain ballads, blues manifestos and dance-hall festivity, played on instruments built of broken bottles, twisted forks, dried bones, gas cans, shoes, saw blades, a toy keyboard, and an overhead compartment’s worth of luggage.

Kyle Wall, the Brooklyn-based songwriter who records under the name Wharfer, doesn’t exactly sing his melodies. He swirls them around in his mouth, chewing on his words as he describes how they taste. And while his influences are all immediately clear (Bill Callahan, Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, later Bob Dylan), Wall doesn’t really sound like anyone else. His voice is the first thing you’ll notice about his music: his folksy drawl, his odd pronunciation, a phlegmy grumble like he’s fighting a cold. And while some singers might sand down their idiosyncrasies as their songwriting progresses, Wall has doubled down on them with Scenes of the Tourist. Over 12 songs, he has refined his music to mostly piano and vocals, relegating his backing band to more atmospheric duties while his strange and weary voice does the heavy lifting.

In Other Words is a lively, charming, gossipy memoir of life in the publishing trenches and how one restlessly curious young woman sparked a creative awakening in a new country she chose to call home.