Billy Bragg
The Majestic Theatre 4140 Woodward Ave., Detroit, Michigan, United StatesThe Roaring Forty USA Tour 2024
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The Roaring Forty USA Tour 2024
Special Guest: Imaad Wasif
Royal Oak Music Theatre 318 W 4th St, Royal Oak, MI, United StatesIs there another songwriter so fearless and inventive? Bending decades of pop music into new shapes, Neko Case wields her voice like a kiss and her metaphors like a baseball bat. She has cast the fishing net of her career wide—from Seattle and Vancouver to Chicago and Stockholm, setting up her home base on a farm in New England.
Special Guest: Sean Patton
Michigan Theater 603 East Liberty, Ann Arbor, MI, United StatesEmmy Award winner and two-time Grammy Award nominee, David Cross is an inventive performer, writer, and producer on stage and screen. David’s eighth stand-up special, David Cross: Worst Daddy In The World, is available on the 800 Pound Gorilla Media YouTube channel, and he will join the cast of the Netflix series, The Umbrella Academy, for their fourth and final season premiering August 8.
Gillian Welch’s rich and remarkable career spans over twenty-five years, and she and her musical partner David Rawlings are a pillar of the modern acoustic music world. They have been hailed by Pitchfork as “modern masters of American folk” and “protectors of the American folk song” by Rolling Stone.
This special show will kick off both the 2025 Ann Arbor Folk Festival and The Ark's 60th Anniversary year and will feature over a dozen Michigan-based artists each performing renditions of popular songs released in 1965 - the year The Ark was founded.
Not long before the making of their new album Ooh La La, Guster celebrated three decades together as a band—a journey that’s included landing a series of hits on the Billboard charts, working with luminaries like Steve Lillywhite and Richard Swift, launching their own music festival, and amassing an ardent fanbase partly on the strength of their relentless touring and deeply communal live show. But despite reaching a milestone few musical acts ever come close to attaining, Guster’s ninth studio LP reveals a band fully in touch with the voracious creative energy that first inspired their formation.
Over his almost 30 year career, Matt Nathanson has evolved into one of the most applauded songwriters and engaging performers on the music scene today. His sixth studio album, Some Mad Hope, yielded his breakthrough multi-platinum hit "Come on Get Higher.” He followed up with Modern Love, a critically acclaimed album (PopMatters called it "the closest a pop album comes to perfection this year”) that garnered Nathanson two RIAA Gold Certified singles, “Faster” & “Run (featuring Sugarland)”
This show will be an evening with, Herb Alpert and his brand new Tijuana Brass. Herb along with his 6 great musicians will be playing all of your favorite TJB hit songs just as you remember hearing them while growing up.
Special Guest: Alex Harding & Organ Nation
Michigan Theater 603 East Liberty, Ann Arbor, MI, United StatesExplosions in the Sky are an iconic instrumental rock band from Texas that have become the gold standard for bold, emotional, cinematic music and are known for their incendiary live concerts. They’ve slowly grown from playing DIY spaces and opening for Fugazi to having headlined Radio City Music Hall, Royal Albert Hall, the Greek Theatre, and the Sydney Opera House. Over 24 years of being a band (with the same four members the entire time), they’ve achieved remarkable commercial success from an especially non-commercial corner of the music world, selling more than 1.3 million copies over six studio albums, and scoring five major motion pictures in the process. They’ve become the sound of modern sports films, documentaries and television, while managing to not sound like any other popular artist.
Special Guest: Wryn
Royal Oak Music Theatre 318 W 4th St, Royal Oak, MI, United StatesAni DiFranco has been known as a feminist icon and pioneer of DIY for nearly 35 years. Since founding her record label Righteous Babe Records in 1990, she has released 22 albums, traversing folk, punk, hip-hop, soul and electronic genres and addressing a range of autobiographical, political and social issues. She is on tour with her newest album, Unprecedented Sh!t.
Special Guest: L.A. Exes
The Majestic Theatre 4140 Woodward Ave., Detroit, Michigan, United StatesWith a career that includes award-winning videos, New York Times op-eds, collaborations with pioneering dance companies and tech giants, animators and Muppets, and an experiment that encoded their music on actual strands of DNA, OK Go continues to fearlessly dream and build new worlds in a time when creative boundaries have all but dissolved. The band has been recognized for their achievements with 21 Cannes Lions, 12 CLIOs, 3 VMAs, 2 Webbys, The Smithsonian Ingenuity Award, and a Grammy.
For Jesse Cook, music has been a journey. Sonically and literally.
“Over the years, I’ve taken my music and tried to cross-pollinate it with music from different parts of the world,” explains the 50-year-old global-guitar virtuoso. “For the (2003) album Nomad, I went to Cairo and recorded with musicians there. On my (2009) record The Rumba Foundation, I went to Colombia, and worked with musicians from Cuba as well. On (1998’s) Vertigo, I went down to Lafayette, La., and recorded with Buckwheat Zydeco. For me, the question has always been: Where did you go? Where did you take your guitar?”