BEGIN:VCALENDAR METHOD:PUBLISH VERSION:2.0 CALSCALE:GREGORIAN PRODID:-//NONSGML Sandhills Development\, LLC//NONSGML Sugar Calendar Fe eds v3.4.0//EN X-WR-CALNAME:Carbon Leaf – Show 2: 9pm X-WR-CALDESC:Portland Downtown X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/New_York BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 DTSTART:20221106T060000 TZNAME:EST END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 DTSTART:20221106T060000 TZNAME:EST END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Carbon Leaf – Show 2: 9pm DESCRIPTION:ADVANCE PURCHASE: $35\nDAY-OF: $45\n10% MEMBER DISCOUNT\n\n It felt so good to get back on the road again in 2021. It was a huge r elief\, with safety on everyone’s minds\, to know that the efforts wer e paying off\,” says Carbon Leaf frontman Barry Privett.\n\n“The sys tems worked very well we were able to connect through live music once ag ain. When we got home in December\, we went right to work writing and re cording. We wanted this album to have a little bit more fun than our 202 1 release\, Gathering 2: The Hunting Ground. This new album will be expa nding that neighborhood\, musing on space and time\, and the brief momen t we get to experience it as Earthlings\, if you will.”\n\nThe ongoing Gathering series the band has been working on over the last few years i s all about building community.\n\n“It’s a call to look inwards and find what matters\, an invitation to reach out and embrace the gifts of human connection.” Privett says.\n\nThat’s no mean feat given the de ep divisions that have defined much of the past few years of American li fe\, but Carbon Leaf has always punched above their weight\, defying the odds at every turn and redefining what’s possible for a modern indie band in the process. The group’s extraordinary new mini-album\, Gather ing 2: The Hunting Ground\, is no exception. Recorded at the band’s ow n studio in Richmond\, VA\, the collection marks the second installment of the group’s four-part Gathering series\, which finds the long-runni ng quintet stripping their sound back to its organic\, acoustic core as they reckon with our ever-conflicting desires for unity and independence . The songs here are gutsy and probing\, grappling with grief\, loss\, a nger\, and pain\, and the arrangements are aggressive and insistent to m atch\, fueled by layers of relentlessly strummed guitars\, rolling banjo \, and lush fiddle. The result is a moving\, cathartic collection that s unafraid to confront darkness and doubt head on\, a poignant\, revela tory record all about the power of self-reflection and the ties that bin d.\n\n“One of the big questions we found ourselves grappling with as a band was\, ‘How do you actually make any kind of a difference in soci ety today?’” says Privett. “And I don’t think you can do that wi thout first looking inwards—to yourself\, your family\, your friends and figuring out what your values truly are.”\n\nAnyone who’s caugh t a Carbon Leaf show over the past three decades probably has a pretty g ood idea just what those values are: brotherhood\, commitment\, empathy\ , integrity\, self-reliance. Founded at Randolph-Macon College in 1992\, the group evolved from a houseparty cover band into something far more profound after graduation\, when they moved to Richmond and made the shi ft to original music. The band’s first three albums helped build a dev oted cult following\, but it was 2001’s Echo Echo that truly brought C arbon Leaf to national attention\, with lead single “The Boxer” earn ing the group a performance slot in front of millions of viewers at the American Music Awards. After nearly ten years of self-releasing and grin ding it out on the road (both as headliners and as guests appearing on b ills alongside the likes of Dave Matthews Band\, O.A.R.\, Jason Mraz\, B lues Traveler\, and Guster\, among others)\, the band signed with Vangua rd Records in 2004 for their critical and commercial breakthrough\, Indi an Summer\, which yielded a Top 5 hit at AAA radio and garnered rave rev iews everywhere from The Washington Post to WXPN. While the band would g o on to release two more similarly well-received albums with Vanguard\, it soon became obvious to everyone that independence wasn’t simply an ideal for Carbon Leaf\, but rather an integral part of their DNA\, and s o in 2010\, the band parted ways with the label in order to return to th eir DIY roots and take complete and total control of their career. Actin g as their own label\, distributor\, and manager\, the band cut new vers ions of all three Vanguard albums in order to regain the rights to the r ecordings\, launched their own festival\, and began releasing a successf ul series of direct-to-fan concert films\, livestreams\, and studio reco rds leading up to the first installment of the Gathering series in 2018. \n\n“The initial idea for these Gathering albums was to get a bunch of our musical friends together in the studio for a weekend and make somet hing really communal and collaborative\,” explains Privett. “We had some of our pals from We Banjo 3 join in on Volume 1\, but for the secon d installment we decided to strike out on our own because the songs just felt more personal and introspective.”\n\nThough Carbon Leaf had trad itionally embraced a wall of sound approach in the studio\, this time ar ound they went back to the basics\, focusing on raw\, acoustic arrangeme nts that placed the storytelling front and center. With guitarist Terry Clark handling engineering duties\, the band—Privett\, Clark\, stringe d instrument wizard Carter Gravatt\, bassist Jon Markel\, and drummer Je sse Humphrey—captured performances on and off over the course of rough ly six months\, experimenting with a wide variety of instruments and mic placements to generate a series of immersive\, transportive sonic lands capes.\n\n“Space was a big thing for us when we were making these reco rdings\,” says Clark. “Moving the microphones further away so we cou ld really capture the room and the air helped add lot of the character a nd dimension these songs needed.”\n\nWhile some of the tracks here beg an life as instrumental demos from Gravatt\, others first took shape as a capella lyrical or melodic ideas from Privett. Regardless of where eac h tune began\, though\, the finished product would inevitably wind up be aring the unmistakable fingerprints of all five bandmates\, whose infect ious chemistry consistently yields more than the sum of its parts.\n\n We like to take a world-building approach in the studio\,” says Prive tt. “We’ll stack things up and layer them on top of each other until we’ve got something that sounds way beyond just five guys in a room t ogether.”\n\nThat alchemy is obvious from the outset on The Hunting Gr ound\, which opens with the churning “Everything’s Alright Mama.” Mixing gritty Appalachian folk with lilting Celtic influences\, the trac k begins with both feet on the ground and builds into a soaring work of bittersweet beauty\, balancing the mundane and the magical in equal meas ure as it reaches out into the void for connection. Like much of the alb um\, it’s a bright\, uptempo tune\, but dig beneath the surface and yo u’ll find an underlying sense of sadness that permeates the often-impr essionistic lyrics. The driving “Her Father’s Pride\,” for instanc e\, grapples with division on both a personal and a communal scale\, whi le the rollicking “Smokey Joe Of The Poconos” explores what happens to those left behind in the name of progress\, and the mesmerizing “Pa le Blue Dot” zooms out to contemplate our place and our purpose in the greater scheme of the universe. It’s perhaps the muscular title track \, though\, that best encapsulates the sense of questioning and longing that defines the collection\, with Privett singing\, “Is this all we h ave\, the natural world? Is anyone around?”\n\n“The idea of the hunt ing ground is that it’s this place where you’re searching for someth ing out in the great wild unknown\,” says Privett. ”How do you proce ss grief? How do you fix your soul in the face of losing someone you car e about? How do you carry on when life doesn’t go the way you’d plan ned?”\n\nIn the end\, of course\, there are no easy answers to these q uestions\, and that’s precisely the point. The hunt is an endless one\ , but it doesn’t need to be lonely. We’re all in the search together \, and after more than a year of distance and isolation\, it’s hard to think of anything we need more than a good old fashioned gathering. URL;VALUE=URI:https://portlandmaine.com/events/carbon-leaf-show-2-9pm/ UID:urn:uuid:a31c0ecd-cfb6-4437-acc9-376b79b81719 STATUS:CONFIRMED ORGANIZER: DTSTAMP:20260502T155328Z DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20221110T210000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20221110T230000 LOCATION:181 State St.\, Portland\, Maine 04101\, US END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR