(NEWTON, NJ) -- The Newton Theatre presents Tinsley Ellis with Dana Fuchs Band on Friday, August 18, 2023 at 8:00pm. Tickets range from $39-$49.
Georgia troubadour Tinsley Ellis has been immersed in music his whole life. Born in Atlanta 1957 and raised in southern Florida, he acquired his first guitar at age seven, inspired by seeing The Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show. Like many kids his age, Ellis discovered the blues through the back door of British Invasion bands like The Yardbirds, Cream and The Rolling Stones as well as Southern rockers like the Allman Brothers Band. 20 albums (and millions of miles traveled) later on record labels such as Alligator and Capricorn, Ellis has become an elder statesman of the blues world.
With his new project Tinsley Ellis - Acoustic Songs And Stories, Ellis performs many of his most popular songs (plus delta blues and classics by artists like Gregg Allman, Bob Dylan and Leo Kottke) on his 1937 National Steel and 1969 Martin D-35. Ellis weaves the music together with interesting and sometimes ribald stories from over 40 years of a life spent on stages and in motels and truck stops. Ellis shows no signs of slowing down and is headed your way with his newest and perhaps most unique project.
With her feet planted on both sides of the blues-rock divide, Dana Fuchs is one of the fiercest voices in modern-day roots music. She's equal parts soul singer and bluesy belter, funneling her own story — a tale of small-town roots, family tragedy, trials, and triumph — into the amplified anthems and haunting ballads that fill albums like Bliss Avenue and Love Lives On. With her newest project, Borrowed Time, she digs deep into her southern rock upbringing, saluting the loud, guitar-driven sounds that sound-tracked her childhood years in rural Wildwood, Florida.
You can take the singer out of Wildwood, but you can't take the Wildwood out of the singer. Decades after her musical awakening in small-town Florida, Dana Fuchs pays proper tribute to the sounds of the south — particularly the loud, seat-shaking slash-and-burn of rock & roll — with Borrowed Time. "In my genre, you're never going to do a show without someone asking for 'Freebird,'" she says with a laugh. "Instead of covering Skynyrd, I just made my own southern rock album." Borrowed Time also finds her reuniting with Ruf Records, returning Fuchs to the label's roster after the independent release of Love Lives On.
With songs that emphasize support and sisterhood during times of struggle, Borrowed Time is an album for the present, inspired by the incendiary music of the past. "This marks the beginning of Chapter 2, in music as well as in life," says Fuchs. "I'm going out into the world and writing about the people who share it with me. My own story is always going to be in there, too, but this is the first album where other people's stories are informing my own emotions."
Tickets range from $39-$49 and will be available for purchase online starting July 7 at 10:00am.
The Newton Theatre is located at 234 Spring Street in Newton, New Jersey.