Nick Dittmeier & The Sawdusters

The Cave presents

Nick Dittmeier and The Sawdusters

wsg/ Daphne Parker Powell

Thursday, October 6, 2022 7pm $10

Nick Dittmeier & the Sawdusters understand that to stay relevant, country and Americana—like any long-running musical genres—must be unceremoniously leveled from time to time. Blasted by a cold steel wrecking ball, and reassembled into new forms atop the rubble. And what better moment for a scheduled demolition than with all of planet Earth in a holding pattern, straddling the deep
chasm between past and future. Into this void arrives Heavy Denim, an album that artfully sidesteps any slavish, formulaic adherence to roots-music traditions. 

“At the height of the pandemic” Dittmeier says, “it became clear to me that—with everything we’d been through—there was going to be a different mind coming out the other side. As a band, we decided we weren’t going to try to go back and replicate who we were, or the reality we were living before covid. A lot of people were fixated on getting back to quote-unquote normal, but to me it
seemed pretty obvious that wasn’t even on the table.” 

Forcing themselves out of their comfort zones, Dittmeier & the Sawdusters began stripping back their roots-rock bluster and leaving room for new textures: drum machines, loopers, synths. Heavy Denim finds Dittmeier and the Sawdusters fearlessly reinventing their sound. The album is in the tradition of Dire Straits’ spacey, synth-anchored early-’90s country curveball On Every
Street; Alabama Shakes’ transformation from gritty Southern neo-soul revue to danceable indie-rock darlings on Sound & Color; and the symphonic R&B and art-folk Sturgill Simpson wove on the astral
loom that is A Sailor’s Guide to Earth. With its refreshing creativity and sonic adventurousness, Heavy Denim is one of those rare and wonderful records that expands the boundaries of its genre. 

Three years in the making, The Starter Wife is the much anticipated follow-up to 2018's Scared Fearless.  It's a collaboration between songwriter Yours Truly, arranger and multi-intrumentalist Kieran Ledwidge, and producer Duane Lundy. 

Pre-Order is available here :: https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-starter-wife

A departure from the road-weary adventurer in Scared Fearless, The Starter Wife swan dives into the maelstrom of divorce, shattering, reinvention, healing and hope.

It features a star-studded cast of musicians, and a Joni's Blue album vibe. The demos are done, the songs are road tested and heartbreakingly beautiful, and the studio has been booked to capture the final performance the last week of March. 

These compositions encompass the experience of betrayal, abandonment, and grief that came for me in a small period of time where I lost my godfather to a respiratory disease, a family member attempted suicide, and my husband left me. The maelstrom of feeling, inundation of fear and grieving was enough to pull me to brink of my own mental health. I was able to turn that anguish into a 93 poem volume over two years. These poems have begun to take shape in song and over many re-tellings of the stories in my performances now have an arc and a purpose - connectivity, the sharing of experience helping even the most isolated of feelings find ground in their ubiquity across ages, genders, races, social and economic backgrounds.