Show 8pm // 21+
***This is a standing room general admissions show. There will be a limited number of chairs located in the back of the concert hall. Seating will be first come first served. The restaurant will be open for dinner starting at 4pm.
Felton Music Hall Presents:
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS & JENNY O.
Jenny Owen Youngs -
In the decade since Jenny Owen Youngs last released a full-length album, she’s toured the world, co-written a #1 hit single, launched a wildly popular podcast, landed a book deal, placed songs in a slew of films and television series, moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles to coastal Maine, and gotten married, divorced, and married again. She’s done everything, it seems, except release another album.
“After writing a zillion songs with other artists and immersing myself in other people’s voices for ten years, I finally started to get excited about making my own music again,” she explains. “It was like I took this extended sorbet course, and after that palate cleanser, I was ready to dig back in.”
With her exceptional new Yep Roc debut, Avalanche, Youngs delivers a main course worthy of the wait. Written with a series of friends including S. Carey, Madi Diaz, The Antlers’ Peter Silberman, and Christian Lee Hutson and recorded with producer Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman, The Hold Steady, Cassandra Jenkins, Josh Ritter), the collection is an achingly beautiful exploration of loss, resilience, and growth from an artist who’s experienced more than her fair share of each in recent years. The songs are deceptively serene here, layering Youngs’ infectious pop sensibilities atop lush, dreamy arrangements that often belie the swift emotional currents lurking underneath. The performances, meanwhile, are riveting and nuanced to match, gentle yet insistent as they reckon with the pain of regret and the joy of redemption, sometimes in the very same breath. The result is the most raw and arresting release of Youngs’ remarkable career, a brutally honest, deeply vulnerable work of self-reflection that learns to make peace with the past as it transforms doubt and grief into hope and transcendence.
“There’s a good deal of heartbreak and disappointment in this music,” Youngs explains, “but it ultimately gives way to excitement and promise, to the incredible, immeasurable bliss of falling in love and finding yourself again. These songs travel the whole emotional spectrum.”
That kind of range has been Youngs’ calling card from the very start. Born and raised in rural New Jersey, she fell in love with The Beatles at an early age before eventually finding her way to The Cranberries and Elliott Smith in high school. Her self-recorded debut, Batten Down The Hatches, landed a high-profile sync in the Showtime series Weeds and led to a deal with Nettwerk Records, which re-released the album along with her 2009 follow-up, Transmitter Failure. Widespread acclaim and dates with the likes of Regina Spektor, Ingrid Michaelson, Frank Turner, and Aimee Mann followed, but by the time Youngs released her third album, 2012’s An Unwavering Band Of Light, she was ready for a change of pace, moving to LA to focus on writing for other artists and for film and TV. In 2016, Youngs co-wrote Pitbull’s “Bad Man,” which debuted at the 58th annual Grammy Awards; in 2017, she co-wrote Shungudzo’s “Come On Back,” which was featured in the Fifty Shades Freed soundtrack; and in 2018, she co-wrote Panic! At The Disco’s smash hit “High Hopes,” which went five-times platinum and broke the record for most weeks atop Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs chart. Along the way, Youngs also launched Buffering The Vampire Slayer, an episode-by-episode podcast devoted to Buffy The Vampire Slayer that attracted more than 160,000 monthly listeners and led to a book deal with St. Martin’s Press. Youngs recently launched a new series with her podcasting partner/ex-wife called The eX-Files and has a narrative fiction podcast due out next year, as well.
Jenny O. -
Jenny O. is a singer-songwriter living in Los Angeles, California. Her latest release and fifth record, Spectra, is her most joyful and her favorite. It has been called “psychedelic pop” and likened to an “instruction manual for healing and kindness.” It is also, at times, rowdy and funny. Spectra was produced by Kevin Ratterman (My Morning Jacket, S.G. Goodman, Andrew Bird).
Songs by Jenny O. can be heard in television soundtracks like Orange Is The New Black, Shameless, and Grey’s Anatomy, or featured in The Sims and Rocksmith video games. She has toured with Jenny Lewis, Violent Femmes, The Proclaimers, Father John Misty, Rodriguez, and performed on recordings by Conor Oberst, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and Jim James.
Jenny O. recently recorded a solarpunk album— ecological pop songs for a decarbonizing society— or music for solving the climate crisis. She invites us to envision non-dystopian futures after fossil fuels. What does it look like to get it right? How does it feel? By accommodating only negative outcomes in our minds and pop culture, we use our available attention on despair and uphold the status quo. Yet if we envision a just, renewable energy transition, with intentional regeneration of our ecosystems to cool the planet, we are activated to get there. This album will be out in 2025.