Darren Jessee w/ Natalie Jane Hill

Though best known as the drummer/harmonizer for beloved piano-rockers Ben Folds Five, Darren Jessee makes more understated, textured singer/songwriter fare both as leader of Hotel Lights and as a solo artist. After releasing three albums with “the Five” in the mid to late ’90s, he made four acclaimed Hotel Lights records between 2004 and 2016 while logging time touring with Sharon Van Etten and Hiss Golden Messenger performing on Hiss’s celebrated album Hallelujah Anyhow. He also contributed to The War on Drugs 2017 Grammy winning album, a period that also saw a fourth LP from a reunited Ben Folds Five (2012’s The Sound of the Life of the Mind, their debut in the U.S. Top Ten). In 2018, Jessee issued the more delicate — and often drums-free — The Jane Room 217, his first official solo album, with which he continued to prove himself an evocative, timeless lyricist. The similarly intimate and expressive Remover and Central Bridge followed in 2020 and 2023. Darren’s anticipated new solo album is expected in the Spring of 2027. 

Natalie Jane Hill is a Texas native guitarist and singer-songwriter based outside of Asheville, North Carolina. She writes songs that reach for the haunted and comforting corners of the world, dressed in a gently virtuosic and singular approach to finger-style guitar. Her new record, Hopeful Woman, is composed of slender songs, life-sized, in which humans endeavor to reconcile themselves to wildernesses and cities; rearrange their rooms and open windows to be closer to the world outside and its choruses of frogs and crickets; attempt and fail to reach one another across a kitchen table; weather natural disaster. If something we might deign to call self-discovery emerges over the course of these narratives, it owes in no small part to the scale of their scenes, to the modesty of their ambitions, in which tumult and adaptation and growth are metabolized through a body’s gentle actions and reactions, its moments of quietude and observation and reflection