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Live Nation Presents:
Eliza McLamb with Mini Trees, and Dan O'Grady (SOLD OUT)
Mon, Apr 15
Doors: 7:00 pm | Show: 8:00 pm
Tickets: $20.00 Sold Out
All Ages
For any event that is listed as 18 or 21 and over, ANY ticket holder unable to present valid identification indicating that they are of age will not be admitted to this event, and will not be eligible for a refund.  Any event listed as All Ages, means 6 years of age or older.  ALL tickets are standing room only unless otherwise specified.  If you need special accomidation, contact info@cafedunord.com. 

Support acts are subject to change without refund.

Professional Cameras are not allowed without prior approval.  Professional Camera defined as detachable lens or of professional grade as determined by the venue staff. When in doubt, just email us ahead of the show! We might be able to get you a Photo Pass depending on Artist’s approval.

Artists

Eliza McLamb

Singer-songwriter Eliza McLamb is coming of age right in front of us. When the beginning of the pandemic interrupted McLamb’s studies at George Washington University, she eschewed the pre-law path she’d planned for herself and headed west. She started sharing original songs on TikTok while working on farms in North Carolina and Kansas, and was shocked to see her videos find a devoted audience. “I'd been writing songs since I was six years old. It just never really occurred to me that there would be anyone interested,” says McLamb.

Soon, her intimate songs about relationships, body image, and the complexities of life as a young woman started racking up millions of views apiece. Her earliest tracks were deeply personal, made from nothing but her voice and a guitar and recorded in the laundry shed where she lived at the time. Nevertheless, they contained something that resonated — an intimacy borne from her ability to speak to the universal while also speaking only for herself.

Her upcoming EP, Salt Circle, is the culmination of a period spent focused on self-reflection. McLamb departs from stripped-back guitar and DIY production and ventures towards a lush sonic landscape, with the help of producer Sarah Tudzin aka illuminati hotties. On the single “Doing Fine,” McLamb is clearer-eyed than ever before, both sharp and soft in equal measure; and in chaotic times for all of us, her reflections on the confusion of everyday life feel prescient and necessary.

“The EP encapsulates this idea of processing the world and your life and trying to make some meaning out of it,” McLamb explains. “The arc of the EP starts with songs about me feeling very disillusioned with what my life is ending up to be — not so much in the material circumstances but in the ways that my consciousness is dealing with it.

“It’s this negotiation of, like, how can I hold on to the things that I love in a world where everything is changing? How can I be happy with my circumstances when I have this war going on inside of me? And how can I learn to accept myself as a person who is deeply feeling and deeply sensitive? The whole thing is basically me deciding if I want to really live life the way that I know I’m meant to, which is a deeply feeling person... And if I want to be a part of that, or if I want to check out of that.”

The subtle power of McLamb’s music is her ability to make every listener feel personally and intimately spoken to. To her audience, her music is a whispered revelation; it often feels reciprocal, like a secret shared between friends. It’s an energy that’s also fostered in her writing, her warm social media presence, and her podcast, Binchtopia, where her wry cultural commentary has drawn a legion of fans.

It’s perhaps more accurate, though, to describe experiencing McLamb’s music as peering into an interior world — reading the diary, pulling back the curtain, catching a glimpse of the deeply personal machinations of someone else’s life. McLamb’s music at times offers such an authentic interrogation of her own experiences that it can feel like something we were never meant to see. It’s all the more impressive, then, that there’s something so universal nestled inside her echoing verses and yearning vocals.

“It’s always an internal process,” McLamb says. “But when I write a song that’s principally just for me, that I wrote to figure out some emotion or to express some story or something like that, and then I put it out into the world, there have always been people who resonate so deeply with it. They look at that piece of art that I made for me and say, ‘Oh, this feels like it's for me.’ And that in so many ways reinforces my spirituality, honestly — my inherent belief that we are all part of one collective energy source, and that we all experience very similar things and have solidarity in our emotions and our sensitivity.”

Mini Trees

For better or for worse, life keeps moving forward. It's this fundamental truth that Lexi Vega, the creative force behind Mini Trees, confronts throughout her debut album Always In Motion. But coming to terms with this inevitability has been a life-long struggle.

The daughter of a Cuban-born father and Japanese-American mother, the uniqueness of her identity has been an ever-present tension in Lexi's life. She never quite fit in growing up within predominantly white communities in suburban southern California, with few who around her outside of her family to understand the generational scars caused by both exile and internment. When she was only 5 years old, Vega's father, a professional drummer himself, took his own life. These traumas set in motion an ongoing questioning of Vega's own self identity -- and Mini Trees has provided the palette for Vega to process, to persevere, and to grow.

After playing drums in various projects for years, Vega began writing and recording her own music under the moniker Mini Trees in 2018. She recorded her first solo track in the Summer of 2018 with producer Jon Joseph and was immediately hooked on the feeling of creating something that spoke directly to her as an artist, fully in control of her own vision. Mini Trees debut EP, Steady Me, dropped in 2019 and Vega followed it with 2020's EP, Slip Away.

Following the release of these two EPs and with ample time to work on music during 2020, Vega both found herself ready to progress creatively and challenging many of her long-held beliefs and notions about her own identity. Originally envisioned to be yet another EP, Vega instead began working on what would become her debut full length, Always In Motion, a collection of relatable indie-pop songs that acknowledge our collective anxiety about life's improbability.

"Moments In Between," Always In Motion's ethereal opening number, was written early on in the process, kick-starting Vega into songwriting mode and reflecting the anxiety and dread she was grappling with as the world shut down around her. That sense of uncertainty pervades the album, although it's more universal than circumstantial as Vega uses the lyrics to consider how we move through life with a constant sense of unknowing. "Moments In Between" wonders whether spiritual belief can help us accept all types of challenges, although the introspective track doesn't necessarily find a conclusion.

"When you're in the midst of something painful you long to get to the other side of it," Vega explains. "You want to be free from that. Faith can mean that even though life is long and painful, there is hope at the end of it all. I like the idea of there being something better than this on the other side. That possibility acknowledges that while people go through periods of intense anxiety and dread, they make it through."

"Carrying On," a pulsating, layered track, was written during a trip to the desert, where Vega struggled to reconcile her sense of the world with actual reality, especially during a time when everything felt so unbelievable and surreal. The lush "Cracks in the Pavement" reflects on identity, with Vega acknowledging and embracing who she is and recognizing that change has to come from within.

Those themes extend into "Spring" as Lexi explores long-term relationships, wondering whether they can withstand one partner's internal evolution. "It explores that fear of when you care about something so much that you don't want to lose it," she notes.

The closing track, "Otherwise," confirms that there is no easy answer for these queries, but maybe that's okay. Life, as usual, moves forward.

"I liked the idea of ending on an unresolved note," Lexi says. "It emphasizes that there's no certainty until we reach the end. That's the only truth that seems reliable. You can't ever know what's going to happen until you get there. And that doesn't have to conjure up feelings of dread. Over the course of the album I teeter-totter between having questions and wanting answers, but the resolution is to be okay with not knowing. I think I do find some acceptance along the way, but the album purposefully concludes with no real resolution."

Dan O'Grady

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