Sat, Mar 23 - 9:30pm - $10

 With Chicago roots and Texas ties, Daphne Willis brings both musicality and grit to the songs she writes and plays. Born in San Antonio to a classically trained vocalist and audio engineer, Daphne began singing at an early age and found her way to the guitar in high school. Since then, she’s developed the confidence, melodic mastery and vocal range that have won her admirers from here to Beijing. Daphne didn’t plan a career in music. But as a student at DePaul University in Chicago, she found herself performing at open mic nights, which led to regular Chicago gigs and, eventually, a decision to leave school and hit the road. So she assembled a band and began playing 200 shows a year across the United States. Daphne released her independent EP Matter of Time in September 2007; in a twist of fate, Vanguard Records head Kevin Welk heard a track on an American Airlines flight. This led to a record deal in 2008 and the release of her second EP, Exhibit A.To record her first full-length album, Daphne headed to the hills of Tennessee. She released What to Say in 2010, which was co-produced by Tim Lauer and Grammy winner Gary Paczosa. Album number two, Because I Can, came out in 2011 and reached the number two spot on iTunes’ Top 40 Singer/Songwriter Chart. On her latest EP, Inside Outright, Daphne co-wrote songs with Hunter Davis, Chris Faulk, Angela Lauer, John Oates of Hall & Oates, Keri Barnes and Tim Lauer.Daphne currently calls Nashville home, where she crafts her distinct brand of pop and is poised to expand her fan base world wide. Her most recent EP, 2015’s Get It, features the single “Done With Bein’ Done,” co-written with Grammy Award winner Meghan Trainor. 

Falldown is a band of Chicago musicians from a wide range of backgrounds who have performed together for years in many different groups. Individually, these band members have performed on major stages all across the country with a variety of musical acts. A mutual interest in alt/country and rock'n'roll has now brought this unique crew together to write and perform original music. The Falldown EP, the band's first studio record, was released in November 2012 and has been featured on college radio and WXRT Chicago's Local Anesthetic. The band continues to play to a diverse range of audiences in 2013 and has plans to record new music before the year is over.

 An abbreviated list of Lenker’s achievements so far includes: a significant amount of airplay on the legendary Seattle indie rock station KEXP; a BBC 2 interview with Bob Harris, which is only about the highest honor a rootsy singer-songwriter touring the U.K. can get; opening slots for acts ranging from Willie Nelson to Ray LaMontagne, Nickel Creek, Keith Urban, Susan Tedeschi and Tristan Prettyman; a successful run with one of the hottest young West Coast bluegrass bands of the aughts; and wins in the Merlefest folk songwriting contest as well as the Kerrville Folk Festival’s elite New Folk songwriting competition.Lenker’s composition “My Little Life” brought him the Kerrville honors this year. It doesn’t seem possible that one song could work so well in such disparate worlds, but it also proved its powers as a galvanizing piece of indie-pop, drawing a small army of likeminded, rising Nashville artists and personalities—Jeremy Lister and Katie Herzig to name two—to make lip-syncing, ukulele-strumming cameos in Lenker’s music video.The song—which is on the Heart of Gold EP he co-produced with A-list keyboardist Tim Lauer this year—itself points to the uncommon mixture of abilities Lenker has honed. It’s imminently accessible and effortlessly tuneful, plus the lyrics express a familiar idea in playfully unexpected ways while pointing to thoughtfulness just beneath the surface. You can tell the guy’s well-read, but he never comes off as too clever for his own good.