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Local Music and Art

Dusty Heart

Trapper Schoepp ‘Rangers & Valentines’ Release Party

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Trapper Schoepp has befriended a strange and diverse cast of characters during his 20+ years. That small army of rogues and romantics, drifters and dreamers, soldiers and schemers populate his songs. He got attention with his critically-acclaimed 2012 debut showcase, Run Engine, Run, alongside his band The Shades. The LP earned notices in Rolling Stone, American Songwriter and Paste, with the folks at Huffington Post calling him a “master storyteller” and PBS hailing his work as “story songs that explore and explode the conventions of rock and roll.” The Minnesota-born, Wisconsin-based tunesmith and teller of tales (both tall and true), returns with his second effort Rangers & Valentines.

On Rangers & Valentines, Schoepp defies the limitations of the standard-issue Americana platter, hopping genres – you’ll hear lots of brass, backing singers and B-3 — as the songs build to delirious musical highs. His narratives, meanwhile, find subjects in the narrow margins of society, the strange twists (literal and metaphorical) in the weather, and the vagaries of a troubadour’s transient life – with lyrics that flash a lacerating wit and humanist streak that’s at the core of his craft. With special guests Riverside Horns, Dusty Heart and Cabin Essence. Saturday, May 21, 2016. 8:00pm. $10.00, 21+.

Review – Dusty Heart at the Turf Club, 12/3

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Photo By Natalie Champa Jennings

by Derek Lynch

To warm up the crowd on a freezing Thursday night at the Turf Club in St. Paul, Joe Pug invited local super-duo Dusty Heart to play a set consisting of covers, originals, and pure Americana soul. Minnesota folk heroes Molly Dean and Barbara Jean quietly and confidently took the stage without introduction, plugged in, and tuned before the crowd realized anything was happening. Within seconds of their opener, “the River,” the audience was taken on a trip to Appalachia and the far North where music happens in circles around a jug of whiskey with family and close friends. The original song was reminiscent of the storytellers that define Americana music-I couldn’t help but be reminded of Gillian Welch’s light, rhythmic guitar and Alison Krauss’s ethereal voice. [Read more…] about Review – Dusty Heart at the Turf Club, 12/3