Shanna in a Dress

Shanna in a Dress is your quirky best friend who refuses to wear pants. She says what everyone has felt but no one else will say and you'll get an uncensored journey of clever humor and heartbreak, extreme candor, and a hefty side of entertainment at her shows. This witty wordsmith is known for taking you on an emotional roller coaster, sometimes within the same song. Think John Prine mixed with Ingrid Michaelson with a twist of Phoebe Buffay from Friends all wrapped up in a sweet voice accented by guitar, piano, and ukulele. She's as real as it gets, as anyone who follows her on FB or Instagram knows. 

Shanna started her career at the University of Virginia, fell in love with Boulder, Colorado, and now keeps her fun music flowing out of Nashville unless she's touring the US or Europe. You can't get the same Shanna in a Dress show twice with her spontaneous banter and playful stage presence. She manages to teeter the line masterfully of taking on complex subject matters with smart, bold, and yet accessible lyrics. Her charisma and boldly honest songs are full of interesting language and wordplay and delight audiences of all ages. 

Most recently, Shanna in a Dress was pronounced the winner of the Rocky Mountain Folks Fest Songwriting Contest and will be performing with a full band at the 2023 Rocky Mountain Folks Fest. In 2020 alone, Shanna was a winner in the Kerrville New Folk competition, winner of the Great River Folk Fest Song Competition, a finalist at Songwriter Serenade, and a Grassy Hill Emerging Artist at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. 

During the summer of 2021, Shanna bicycled from Seattle to Boston while music-touring on her epic "Tour de Dress," playing over 60 shows from coast to coast and partnering up with the global non-profit Pangaea World Foundation. 

In May 2022, her debut record "Robot" was released after a wildly successful crowdfunded campaign years earlier. She has most recently been seen gracing the stages of Kerrville Folk Festival, Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, Black Bear Americana Fest, Great River Folk Fest, and the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville. Tom Prasada-Rao calls her "Kerrville's fastest rising star" and she's certainly delightfully unique and is one to watch in the future.

Learn more at https://www.shannainadress.com

Sam Robbins

Sam Robbins is often described as an "old soul singer songwriter." A Nashville based musician whose music evokes classic 70's singer songwriters like James Taylor and Neil Young, Sam adds a modern, upbeat edge to the storyteller troubadour persona. 

Sam Robbins’ third album, So Much I Still Don’t See is a testament to a singer songwriter’s journey through his 20’s, through his formative years of 45,000 miles per year touring and the beginning of a troubadour’s career. Most of all, it is the culmination of firsthand experiences gathered through hard travel and big adventures.

For the listener, these big adventures are heard through a soft, introspective soundscape. Produced by singer songwriter Seth Glier, the album is built sparingly around solo acoustic guitar and vocals, tracked live, just as they are performed live on stage. Recorded in an old church in Springfield, MA, the sounds of So Much I Still Don’t See center around the humility that comes with traveling and experiencing a world much larger than yourself – looking inward and reveling in the quiet of the inner mind while facing an expansive landscape of life on the road. The storytelling in the songs is draped with touches of upright bass, keyboards, organ, and electric guitar, but the core of the album is one man and his worn out Martin guitar, bought new just a few years ago a week after moving to Nashville.

The sonic landscape of So Much I Still Don’t See was largely inspired by the recordings of James Taylor, Jim Croce, Harry Chapin and singer songwriters of the like. Growing up in New Hampshire, Robbins would frequently drive up to the white mountains for weekend hiking trips with his father, accompanied in the old truck by a 70’s singer songwriter CD box set. This music seeped into Robbins’ soul and coupled with experiencing the mountain landscape of his childhood, this “old soul singer songwriter” was shaped by these recordings and the direct, soft and exacting songwriting voices that they exemplified. 

The storytelling in So Much I Still Don’t See is built through small moments, as seen in such lyrics as “stuck in line behind Gladys at the grocery store/smiling as she shows me a new doll for her granddaughter”, the opening line from the title track, and “I’m standing in the sunlight in a public park in Tennessee/ and I know the soft earth below has always made room for me”, from the opening track, “Piles of Sand”, and “the Hooters parking lots are all shining so bright”, from the upbeat, Chet Atkins inspired “The Real Thing”. 

After a brief stint on NBC’s The Voice in 2018, Robbins graduated from Berklee College of Music in 2019 and quickly made his move down to Nashville. After a tumultuous five years in Music City, So Much I Still Don’t See  is the first recording made after moving back to the Boston area in early 2024. After trying his hand at co-writing country songs five days a week, Robbins found his way to a home on the road, now performing over 200 shows per year in listening rooms and festivals across the country.

Growing prowess on acoustic guitar through the years of touring has earned Robbins a large fanbase of fingerstyle guitar fans, and So Much I Still Don’t See is his first album that includes an original instrumental track, “Rosie”, named after his wife’s middle name. The song, a transitional moment midway through the album, was written in a painter’s style – following a melodic line through to it’s end, and changing chord colors around the line as it flows. 

This foray into instrumental writing comes as Robbins is increasingly being recognized as a strong voice in US fingerstyle guitar playing, not just as an accompanist to his vocal.

This touring and subsequent songwriting growth has led to several awards and festival performances, making Robbins a 2021 Kerrville Folk Festival New Folk contest winner, a 2022 Falcon Ridge Folk Festival “Most Wanted to Return” artist, and later a solo mainstage performer at each festival in 2023 and 2024. Robbins has expanded his touring to festivals nationwide, including the Wheatland Festival in Michigan, the Fox Valley Folk Music and Storytelling Festival, and has earned a title as “One of the most promising new songwriters of his generation” — Mike Davies, Fateau Magazine, UK

In early 2023, Robbins was gifted Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations”, a collection of the Roman Emperor’s diaries in the early 100’s AD. The ideas from this book, centered around the concepts of stoicism, seeped into the songs of So Much I Still Don’t See Much of the album reflects on the inner peace found through stoic philosophy that was discovered in reading this book throughout the past year on the road. 

The light, upbeat Buddy Holly sound of “All So Important” works hand in hand with the lyrics, which are a meditation on this philosophy, and the sense that we are all just grains of sand in a larger universe. Verse lyrics such as “A bronze bust of a Roman ruler, emperor of everywhere the sun could shine/ thought his name would live on forever/but now you can only read it if you squint your eyes” are followed by a simple repetition of the sarcastic chorus, “it’s all so, all so important”.

Another influence on the songwriting of So Much I Still Don’t See is Robbins’ work with the group Music Therapy Retreats. This is the first recording made after starting his work with the organization, which pairs songwriters with veterans to help write their often unheard and inspiring stories into songs. This life changing and life-affirming experience has drawn out deeper emotions and deeper stories in Robbins’ own writing and music, inspired by the open hearts and stories of the veterans he is lucky to work with.

The final moment of So Much I Still Don’t See  is a quiet, serene moment with Halley Neal, nationally touring singer songwriter and Robbins’ fiancé. The two have led separate careers after meeting at Berklee College of Music, coming together when the moment is right. As the tenth and final track, the soft, one-take, one-mic cover of The Beatles’ “I Will” was recorded on the last day of recording on a cheap nylon string guitar found in the corner of the studio. The short and sweet love song is a simple finish on the introspective and warm album, spotlighting the true spirit of So Much I Still Don’t See  – calmness and simplicity, always looking forward to the future.

Learn more at https://samrobbinsmusic.com

Housewife

Housewife is a Greensboro-based band that combines R&B, jazz, and rock. The band consists of Seniah Wray on vocals, Lazuli Ortiz on vocals and bass, Joseph Cline on drums, and Ryan Mole on guitar.

Learn more at https://www.instagram.com/housewifeband