with Racing Mount Pleasant + more

Indoor + Outdoor — Times TBD | General Admission | 18+ 

Each album Lawrence Rothman creates is a sacrificial offering — a piece of themself siphoned off and surrendered for the sake of human connection, spiritual liberation and personal metamorphosis. Here Lies Love / Sawdust to Stardust, the  singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer’s fifth studio album, out on KRO Records September 25, is the barest expression of this particular forfeiture. When delivered by Rothman’s extraordinarily rich baritone singing voice, the earthen songs alight. “After twenty years as a singer, the voice itself becomes archaeological,” says Rothman, calling the record “a public reckoning between every version of myself that got buried along the way.” They add, “It’s my album about transformation through ruin, the painful necessity of shedding the identities that once kept me alive. It’s a funeral procession and a resurrection.”

For the last two decades, Rothman has made music as a means of survival, and has worked to survive so that they may continue to create. This reflexive quality is openly expressed on Here Lies Love / Sawdust to Stardust, a fertile, nut-brown album whose twin titles encapsulate the lived-in, beautifully imperfect quality of its country-tinged songs, as well as the alchemy of creativity and the redemptive effects of letting go. Crafted with a coterie of gifted friends and peers, including Madi Diaz, Amanda Shires, Sarah Klang, Katie Pruitt, and Jillian Jaqueline the album also conveys the power and life-giving effects of community. In an era where AI is threatening art and the artist’s way of life, it was important to Rothman to express the one thing software may not mimic: the human experience, in all of its ruffled glory.