$35 advance $40 day of show
Buy tickets in person (without fees) at the State Theatre box office Fridays 10am-5pm, or the night of any State Theatre show starting 1 hour before doors. Please note that ticket prices may fluctuate based on demand.
Kurt Vile is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist known for his distinctive blend of indie rock, folk, and psychedelic music, whose career began in the early 2000s when he started writing and recording songs in his bedroom. In 2008, he released his debut album, “Constant Hitmaker,” which led to his signing to Matador Records.
Following the success of “Constant Hitmaker,” Vile continued to release a string of critically acclaimed albums, including “Childish Prodigy” (2009), “Smoke Ring for My Halo” (2011), “Wakin on a Pretty Daze” (2013), and “b’lieve i’m goin down… (2015),” which further solidified his reputation as one of the most important voices in contemporary rock music. In 2022 he signed to Verve Records, releasing his major label debut “(watch my moves),” followed by a 2023 EP titled “Back to Moon Beach.”
Throughout his career, Vile has collaborated with a diverse range of artists, including Courtney Barnett, J Mascis, John Prine, Kim Gordon, Warpaint, Willie Nelson, and more. His collaborative album with Barnett, “Lotta Sea Lice” (2017), received widespread acclaim and showcased the chemistry between the two musicians.
Kurt Vile has achieved significant commercial success, with over 1 million albums sold globally and over 500 million streams on Spotify. His single “Pretty Pimpin” has been certified Gold by the RIAA.
Vile’s live performances have been featured on late-night television shows such as Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and Late Show with David Letterman. He has also performed on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series and made appearances on Austin City Limits TV for a John Prine tribute, Portlandia, and HBO’s Animals, where he played an animated squirrel. He was even an answer on Jeopardy.
Additionally, Vile’s influence and talent have been recognized by Rolling Stone magazine, which named him one of the 250 Best Guitarists Of All Time.
“I could not be alive alone,” a longtime family friend says with a smile. “None of us could be alive alone.”
Within the quiet, cascading corners of Pittsburgh lies a community – nothing short of one large family – that spans zip codes, histories, occupations, and generations, always tumbling inwardly into itself, propped up by steadfast pillars of conviction toward spiritual and emotional mutual aid. The kind of earnest community scaffolding that gets bandied about, wielded as conjecture, particularly in an age of increasing fracture through digital sublimation, is alive and quite well within the universe surrounding Merce Lemon.
When asked how the city has inspired her creative practice, she responds with a characteristic joke wrapped in an earthen warmth – “There are big hills, three rivers, and more bridges than anywhere in the whole world.” Growing up in a family of art and music in a city with a small, but vigorously supportive scene, Merce has been going to shows here her whole life, even playing them with the “grown up” friends of her parents – as recently as a few years ago, her band was comprised of her own father and his peers in the Pittsburgh music community.
Merce took a step back in 2020, after releasing her last album Moonth, to reassess during an era of anxiety and lockdown – even the reliably nourishing exercise of releasing and playing music felt precarious. “I was grappling with what kind of relationship I wanted with music in my life. It was just something I’d always done, and I didn’t want to lose the magic of that – but I was just having less fun.” In this time of restless confusion, she turned her gaze inwardly, down to the roots – figuratively and literally.
“I got dirty and slept outside most of the summer. I learned a lot about plants and farming, just writing for myself, and in that time I just slowly accumulated songs.” A never-ending creative hunger, supported by the community framework she’d always been able to depend on, had been newly fertilized by the wide-eyed inspiration that came from plunging her hands into both the earth’s soil and her own. Rooting around for an answer, finding and turning in her palms what had been buried there all along – from this rediscovery, imbued with the vitality of earth’s green magic, Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild sprouted forth.
The album emerges, enveloped in propulsive guitars and saccharine-sweet songs of blackbirds and blueberries, from the dead-calm center of a pastoral frenzy in a manner that one could argue as erratic, reckless — a grave misunderstanding, as Merce is just as aware of where she’s being pulled from as she is curious about where to go next. Her sound is built from a reverence and gratitude for the natural world, how paying respect to it charts a clearer path through the choppy waters of the heart. “I can see your relentlessness / in the muddy puddles where retting is / shattering the splintered stalks / where golden braids pour into drops.”
They are songs of belonging just as much as they are songs of longing – ”Say I was a lonely gust of wind / could I redirect them,” she muses in “Crow”, forgoing the voyeur in all of our hearts, hoping only to help direct the “murderous flock” as they help direct her. In this music, romantic and familial love rips into and out of itself, barely registering as disparate feelings in a flurry of reckoning. Do not make the mistake of ascribing a gentle nature to these songs, nor Merce herself. There is a fierceness, a persistence in this vulnerability, that is matched in droves by the wildness of her band. In “Backyard Lover,” the strength of reconciling the quiet conflict of a desire for closeness and solitude in equal parts – “I don’t get out much / is being swallowed by a room supposed to feel this way? / Maybe i’ll come out / babe” – is complemented with the gritted promise of “Foolish and Fast” to plow through mountain highways in search of a respite from heartache — “And my love just passing through you / foolish and fast.” For Merce, the only certainty is an endless questioning, roaring straight past a dogwood, never missing the opportunity to watch a petal fluttering to the ground in the rear view.
There is an oaken warmth in Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild that makes it easy to love – once wild, still free, honest and familiar. Its genesis is timeless, its restlessness eternal – it is one cohesive yet unanswered question built around, and dependent upon, the life-giving force of nature that came before Merce. The album’s closing track also inspires its title – a lonely ballad of forlorn projection into an unknown future, forever protected by the comforting green of Pittsburgh’s hills, rivers, bridges, and homes:
“Old man howling / laughing his teeth out / with the dogs down the hill.
And a tree fell / I smell the wood / and the bark is coming off in sheets / I write my words down on it. And honestly / the thoughts of a husband / weighing on me.”
