Watchhouse

Watchhouse

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Doors 7 pm | 8 pm Bella White | 9 pm Watchhouse

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Tickets:

General Admission Seating: $40
Center Balcony: $50
Side Balcony: $65
Pit Seating: $75

Floor Boxes:
2 top table: $300
3 top table: $450
Private floor box seating includes one bottle of complimentary champagne, private cocktail server for bottle service, limited edition concert poster and fully intimate and uninterrupted views of the band.

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Watchhouse (formerly Mandolin Orange) is an Americana/folk duo based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The group was formed in 2009 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and consists of songwriter Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz, who are married to each other.

Watchhouse has produced six albums of Marlin’s original works of American roots music. In the last three years, the group has toured throughout the U.S and Europe, including appearances at Austin City Limits, South by Southwest, Edmonton Folk Music Festival, Telluride Bluegrass Festival, Newport Folk Festival, Pickathon, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, Rooster Walk, and MerleFest and the Omagh Bluegrass Festival. Watchhouse was the featured artist on CBS This Morning‘s Saturday Morning Sessions.

Bella White:
A truly original new voice in songwriting, Bella White creates an undeniable magic by mining the rare duality at the heart of her artistry. Although she hails from the Canadian city of Calgary, the 22-year-old singer/multi-instrumentalist grew up on the classic country and old-time music she first discovered thanks to her father, a Virginia native who played in bluegrass bands all throughout her childhood. On her debut album Just Like Leaving, White balances her old-soul musicality with a lyrical perspective that’s entirely of-the-moment, embracing an intense self-awareness as she documents her coming-of-age in real-time. “I’m still quite young, but I was very young when I wrote this album,” says the Victoria, BC-based artist. “All of these songs came from processing my feelings right as I was experiencing certain things for the first time in my life.”

By the time 2019 came to its fitful end, Andrew Marlin knew he was tired of touring. He was grateful, of course, for the ascendancy of Mandolin Orange, the duo he’d cofounded in North Carolina with fiddler Emily Frantz exactly a decade earlier. With time, they had become new flagbearers of the contemporary folk world, sweetly singing soft songs about the hardest parts of our lives, both as people and as a people. Their rise—particularly crowds that grew first to fill small dives, then the Ryman, then amphitheaters the size of Red Rocks—humbled Emily and Andrew, who became parents to Ruby late in 2018. They’d made a life of this.

Still, every night, Andrew especially was paid to relive a lifetime of grievances and griefs onstage. After 2019’s Tides of a Teardrop, a tender accounting of his mother’s early death, the process became evermore arduous, even exhausting. What’s more, those tunes—and the band’s entire catalogue, really—conflicted with the name Mandolin Orange, an early-20s holdover that never quite comported with the music they made. Nightly soundchecks, at least, provided temporary relief, as the band worked through a batch of guarded but hopeful songs written just after Ruby’s birth. They offered a new way to think about an established act.

Those tunes are now Watchhouse, which would have been Mandolin Orange’s sixth album but is instead their first also under the name Watchhouse, a moniker inspired by Marlin’s place of childhood solace. The name, like the new record itself, represents their reinvention as a band at the regenerative edges of subtly experimental folk-rock. Challenging as they are charming, and an inspired search for personal and political goodness, these nine songs offer welcome lessons about what any of us might become when the night begins to break.

“We’re different people than when we started this band,” Marlin says, reflecting on all these shifts. “We’re setting new intentions, taking control of this thing again.”

For full bio and promotional material please click here.