Once and a while we decide to play in a Roadhouse. Friday Night, August 6th is one of those occasions. Join us as we split the night with our friends The Honeydogs from Minneapolis, MN at Whiskeybones Roadhouse in Rochester, MN. www.whiskeybonesroadhouse.com

Six Mile Grove on first at 9PM Sharp. The Honeydogs on at 11PM.

Here’s a bit of info from their website: www.honeydogs.com

The last thing The Honeydogs’ lead singer songwriter, Adam Levy, wants his band to be is a Sunshine Committee. You know, the cloying co-workers who attempt to bring a little Trojan Horse happiness to the dysfunctional corporation on the eve of mass layoffs with flowers, pizza, ribbons, lace, and cupcakes? No, the Honeydogs have chosen a tough path, singing about serious subject matter always avoiding the maudlin and producing some music of great emotional intensity, complexity and beauty.

Starting with 2001’s brilliant day darkener, Here’s Luck, the band charted a course of, as Paste magazine said, capturing “the Zeitgeist of this anxious era.” The follow-up, 10,000 Years, was hailed as the bands’ masterpiece—a concept album based on Levy’s experiences in social work telling the story of a poor urban test tube kids’s rise and fall during a genocidal apocalypse in the not-so-distant future. In 2006 the band released Amygdala, a record thematically exploring fear in its varied forms—abandonment, losing children, war & death, aging, social decay.

In 2009 the band emerges with an offering considerably more hopeful in these desperate times. The tracks on Sunshine Committee reflect a complex, often nuanced intersection of art and humanity while marking a return to a more live, rocking sound.

Once featured guests, Matt Darling on trombone and Steven Kung on trumpet have now become integral core members of the band, adding a vintage Stax/Volt-Muscle Shoals unctuousness to the record. Bass player Trent Norton’s writhingly hooky parts almost singularly define the new improved sound. Levy and Brian Halverson have further perfected their guitar matrimony, playing off each other and swapping leads and obbligatos. Peter Sands, given extra real estate space, layers clavinets, harpsichords, pianos, Hammond organs, Chamberlains, and various odd keyboards from his museum of myriad electronic instruments. Drummer Peter Anderson directs traffic like an empathic inner city principal, alternately slamming and playing with great economy, sensitivity and restraint.

As always, the band refers to the traditional soul and rock touchstones while creating something interesting, unpredictable, insightful, and moving: shades of the Stones’ Exile on Main Street, Fresh-era Sly Stone, twilight Hendrix and Revolver-esque Beatles, all with Levy’s surreal, evocative and enigmatic lyrics winding sinuously through the savory mix.

Sunshine Committee is the band’s first truly self-produced effort, with the entire band involved in the conception, engineering and editing of the record. Granted permission to record this and his children’s record (Bunny Clogs) at the Institute of Production and Recording where Levy is a teacher, the EP’s production provided top students with a “laboratory” environment in which to experiment with various mics and recording techniques, comment on arrangement and performance, and assist in the editing process.

Capping off the roster of contributing talent, friend and mainstay John Fields, freshly finished with recording the Jonas Brothers, offered up his mixing expertise to the band.

On the eve of this, the Honeydog’s 10th release, with solo projects and new records percolating, the band emerges confident in their ability to reinvent their sound while keeping alive the best musical and thematic features that have been their trademarks for nearly 15 years.

Dana Cooper has boiled the singer/songwriter thing down to its essentials. He’s got the songs he has written, the guitar he plays them on, and the voice he sings them with. What more do you need?

“A few good stories now and then,” he said.

Cooper, who has been performing for 40 years, recorded his debut album in 1973 in Los Angeles. His career has had ups and down since then, but he has in recent years settled in as a well-regarded songwriter. He will be one of the main attractions at Saturday’s Americana Showcase at Rochester Civic Theatre, sharing the stage with Ray Wylie Hubbard and members of Six Mile Grove.

“It’s a nice place to be in,” Cooper said of his current status. “I don’t stress out about it anymore. I’m fairly driven in what I do, I always have been. But I allow myself to have fallow spots. I don’t worry about writer’s block. I’m more concerned about remembering all the songs I’ve written.”

“He makes his music sound brand new with every new song he writes,” said Brandon Sampson, of Six Mile Grove, who has brought Cooper to Minnesota for a series of gigs. “He approaches tender subjects with very strong and descriptive images.”

Perhaps that’s because Cooper originally wrote poetry and planned to become a painter.

“My songwriting came out of poetry I’d written, and I’d put music to it,” he said during a telephone interview. “Now I tend to write from a musical place and often the lyrics start coming from what the music implies.”

When Cooper’s initial run of success in the 1970s ended, he found himself without a record contract. He went back to school to study horticulture. “I thought I would do that when I didn’t want to be in the music business anymore,” he said. “But I never really quit playing music for very long.”

In the past decade, Cooper has developed a reputation as a man of literate lyrics and tastefully produced songs. “I probably write a lot less about the attraction phase of love than I did in my 20s,” he said. “I’ve always had this recurring theme: Seize the day, make the most of the time you’ve got. Most of what I write about sort of hovers around that theme. Musically, it’s a bit of a challenge to take a different approach.”

After 40 years in the music business, Cooper has seen it all. “I’ve been trying to find the niche I’ve carved out for myself now,” he said. “I’m in a good place.”

Headlining the concert will be Ray Wylie Hubbard, a Texas songwriter who also demonstrates a way with words. “I can say that Muddy Waters is as deep as William Blake,” he sings on his new album, and then sets out to prove it with a mix of blues, country and folk and song titles like “Drunken Poet’s Dream” and “Down Home Country Blues”