Logjam Presents is pleased to welcome The Interrupters + Frank Turner & The Sleeping Souls for a live in concert performance at the Wilma on Thursday, April 27, 2023.
Tickets go on sale Friday, December 16, 2022 at 10:00AM at The Top Hat, online, or by phone at 1 (800) 514-3849. Reserved premium balcony seating and general admission standing-room-only floor tickets are available. All ages are welcome.
Additional ticketing and venue information can be found here.
Formed in 2011, The Interrupters came together when the Bivona brothers—guitarist Kevin Bivona, bassist Justin Bivona, and drummer Jesse Bivona—found themselves on various bills with Aimee (Interrupter) as a solo artist. Upon bonding over musical tastes, the four formed The Interrupters and delivered their self-titled debut in 2014. The Interrupters have shared stages with bands such as Rancid, blink-182, Green Day, Bad Religion, and many other stalwarts of the punk scene solidifying the band’s status as a dynamic force. The band released their fourth studio album In The Wild in August 2022.
Frank Turner is aware of the passage of time, of the influence of days that drag and months that gallop can exert on what he would probably never dream of calling his body of work. After all, it has been a number of years now since the hardcore troubadour transformed himself from The Boy Who Surely Could Not, to The Man That Did; it has been years now that his name has appeared in the largest type on ticket stubs that permit entry to such venues as Wembley Arena, or the Royal Albert Hall; just as it has been years since the sound of his voice projecting itself from a digital radio was anything like a surprise, let alone a novelty.
From the ferocious, sweaty box venues of rock band Million Dead to starting from scratch with an acoustic guitar in pubs and bedrooms in 2005, Frank’s popularity grew with his artistry. Selling out gradually bigger venues – Camden’s Barfly, King’s Cross Scala, Shepherd’s Bush Empire and Wembley Arena (both captured for posterity on DVD); four albums in England Keep My Bones ends up selling 100K copies and rising; performing in front of millions worldwide before the official opening ceremony of London 2012 Olympics; a personal milestone of winning Mastermind with his specialist subject of Iron Maiden. Each year seemed to bring a new elevation, a plateau which initially seemed out of reach but just became a foothold for ascending further.
Naturally, such upward mobility provides reasons to be cheerful, and in ways that it would be lazy to term predictable. But at the same time, the mindful songwriter will take heed: for in order to gain a foothold one can subconsciously lose an edge. The last couple of years shows he’s resolutely refused to let that budge him from an onward course. He’s lived with and inside Positive Songs For Negative People, his sixth album, since writing songs for it in 2014 and continues to garner career highlights.
The album reached number two in the UK album charts upon release in August 2015 (beaten only by Dr Dre’s first album in 16 years, the soundtrack to highly-acclaimed NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton); he played his tenth consecutive slot at Reading and Leeds festival in August 2016, an unprecedented achievement; he released his Amazon number 1 bestseller The Road Beneath My Feet in paperback in February 2016; he sold out a huge autumn and winter 2016 UK tour of regional venues; he released his third compilation of b-sides and rarities, The Third Three Years, plus a bonus disc of unreleased tracks called Ten For Ten (10 tracks for 10 years); and in 2016 alone, he and the Sleeping Souls played to over a quarter of a million people.
And so it goes on.
Frank has his biggest US show to date in Boston come 2017 but before that, he hurtles towards his 2000th show. Frank Turner and the Sleeping Souls – that most supple, dexterous and punishing of permanent backing bands – put in the hard hours to keep this momentum going, never taking forward motion for granted nor allowing obstacles and inertia to slow them down.
If Frank Turner’s fifth album, Tape Deck Heart, released in 2013, was a catharsis of licked-wounds, not to mention the sting of raw and recent personal failure, then Positive Songs For Negative People is the sound of a man putting his show back on the road.
“In some ways I feel like this record is my definitive statement, a summation of the first five records,” says Frank. Though even with ten years and six albums on the clock, it’s already time to move onward. Positive Songs For Negative People may merely be the end of a chapter of an engrossing and lengthy story involving thousands of participants – fans, friends and loved ones. In 2017, Frank Turner will have played over 2,000 shows, written and begun recording new music, celebrated a decade since the release of his debut album Sleep Is For the Week, and laid more road and groundwork for a journey with no end in sight. There isn’t a soul that will be left behind if you choose to join him.
Frank Turner is the author of six albums and has four rarities collections to his name alongside a number of EPs and singles. A Wessex Boy by inclination, these days his post is delivered to Holloway, North London. He intends to spend the next 18 months, and probably the rest of his life, on tour.
About Chuck Ragan
Chuck Ragan’s bracing new release Till Midnight once again confirms what the iconoclastic singer-songwriter’s fans have known all along: that he’s a deeply compelling songwriter and an effortlessly charismatic performer, as well as a true believer in music’s ability to illuminate and inspire.
Till Midnight‘s ten typically impassioned new Ragan compositions embody the artist’s trademark mix of eloquent lyrical insight and catchy, forceful songcraft. The album’s formidable blend of head and heart is reflected on such new tunes as “Something May Catch Fire,” “Vagabond,” “Non Typical,” “Bedroll Lullaby” and “Wake With You,” on which Ragan applies his distinctively raspy voice and sharp melodic sensibility to vividly expressive tunes that reflect both his early grounding in traditional American music and his deep affinity for rock n’ roll.
“There’s a lot of love songs on this one,” notes Ragan, whose work has always shown a knack for addressing individual concerns as well as societal ones. “I love to write love songs because it’s the most powerful emotion. It’s what grounds us to this Earth and makes us want to fight to make the world a better place.
“I always just try to write from the heart and make the music as genuine as I possibly can,” he continues. “By doing that, I’m usually writing about whatever’s going on in my life. And when you’re living your life by wearing your heart on your sleeve, there’s not a lot to hide behind.”
In a musical life that spans close to three decades, Chuck Ragan has consistently worn his heart on his sleeve, and carved out a musical niche in the process. First with post-hardcore trailblazers Hot Water Music and subsequently on his own, he’s built a large and singularly powerful body of work whose honesty, immediacy and warmth have won the loyalty of a fiercely devoted international fan base that’s supported him through his various musical incarnations.
Till Midnight benefits from sensitive production by multi-instrumentalist and Blind Melon/AWOL Nation member Christopher Thorn, and backup by Ragan’s longstanding combo the Camaraderie—guitarist/pedal steel player Todd Beene, fiddler Jon Gaunt and bassist Joe Ginsberg, plus new drummer David Hidalgo Jr., of Social Distortion and formerly of Suicidal Tendencies, and son of Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo—along with Rami Jaffee of Wallflowers/Foo Fighters fame, Ben Nichols of Lucero, Dave Hause, Jenny O., Chad Price and Jon Snodgrass of Drag the River.
To give Till Midnight an appropriately organic, lived-in feel, Ragan gathered the musicians at his home in Northern California for a week of rehearsal, fishing and preproduction, before road-testing the new material in Europe.
“It was really the first time we all learned and rehearsed the songs as a group and laid everything down together,” Ragan explains. “It made a huge difference for everybody to have time to sit and breathe with these songs and let everything develop naturally. There was a feeling that I set out to capture and the guys there were able to help us capture it.”
Although its birth cycle may have been different, the honesty and urgency that distinguish Till Midnight have been constants in the musical journey that began in Ragan’s early years. After playing in numerous bands in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Ragan teamed with Chris Wollard, Jason Black and George Rebelo, with whom he relocated from Sarasota, FL to Gainesville and formed Hot Water Music. That band quickly emerged as one of the American punk scene’s most distinctive and inventive units, winning a reputation as a riveting live act while releasing such well-received studio albums as Fuel for the Hate Game, Forever and Counting, No Division, A Flight and A Crash, Caution and The New What Next, as well as the live discs Live at the Hardback and Live in Chicago and the compilations Finding the Rhythms, Never Ender and Till the Wheels Fall Off.
Feeling the urge to stretch out creatively, Ragan ventured into a more acoustic approach with the side project Rumbleseat, which released several singles and the album Rumbleseat Is Dead. After Hot Water Music disbanded in 2005, Ragan enthusiastically embraced his new status as solo troubadour, exploring an expanded palette of acoustic and electric textures on the acclaimed albums Feast or Famine, Gold Country and Covering Ground, as well as the stripped-down live set Los Feliz and a series of limited-edition subscription singles released in 2006 and 2007, and later compiled on CD as The Blueprint Sessions.
In 2008, Ragan launched the long-running Revival Tour, a series of collaborative acoustic adventures featuring a diverse assortment of punk, bluegrass and alt-country performers. In addition to Ragan, the Revival Tour, which has visited Britain, Europe, Australia and Scandinavia as well as North America, has featured a broad array of talents, including Anderson Family Bluegrass, Rise Against frontman Tim McIlrath, Craig Finn of the Hold Steady, Cory Branan, Ben Kweller, Laura Jane Grace, Jay Malinowski of Bedouin Soundclash, Tim Barry, Austin Lucas, Matt Pryor of the Get Up Kids, Jesse Malin, Chris Carrabba, Chris McCaughan, Lucero’s Ben Nichols, Dave Hause, Flogging Molly’s Matt Hensley and Nathan Maxwell, Joey Cape, Brian Fallon of the Gaslight Anthem, Audra Mae, Emily Barker, Dan Andriano of the Alkaline Trio, along with Jenny O, Kevin Seconds, Frank Turner, Rocky Votolato, Jon Snodgrass, Chad Price and Jenny Owen Youngs.
In 2012—the same year that Ragan reunited with Hot Water Music to record their album Exister—the veteran road warrior released his first book, The Road Most Traveled, a collection of insights and anecdotes on the touring life that serves as both a personal memoir and a helpful how-to handbook. He is currently working on a second volume.
As his book makes clear, and as Till Midnight confirms, Ragan takes his musical mission seriously, drawing inspiration and emotional sustenance from the songwriters and music he surrounds himself with, his family and friends along with the close and loyal relationship with his audience.
“The way I see it,” Ragan observes, “we’re faced with tons of inspiration every day. Every step of this life has a way of teaching you something, showing you something, opening your ears and your heart to something. I have all these friends out there, and this community that supports me, who believe in what I’m doing and who believe in the power of music and the power of community.
“It’s a blessing and a privilege to stand on stage and play music for people,” he continues. “I meet so many folks out there, and they’re so hospitable and so kind and say such nice things to me about the songs. The support and the energy that I get from them is what makes it possible for me to keep doing this. And when I’m there and in that moment, it’s important to me to give it back to them as strongly as they’re giving it to me.”