WesternAF: Chris Acker + Northcote + Rachel Baiman

WesternAF is taking three greats from the States across Europe this May for a live intimate show with some of America’s best kept secrets in country music.

In a genre full of tall tales and marketable lies, Chris Acker crafts candid songs – weaving his wit and woes into a body of work that exposes the stale plight of the American Songster to the honest, and sometimes hilarious, light of day.

Since leaving his childhood home of Seattle, Washington, Chris Acker has called the haggard decadence of the New Orleans Americana world his purlieu. In the tradition of Guthrie and Prine, Chris lends a quavering voice to the half-rotten romance of the unremarkable and unrefined. Regardless if you’re sitting by a backyard fire on a muggy Louisiana night or standing stage-side in some far flung town, when you hear Chris Acker playing, you’re hearing the end result of countless hours of observing the masters of the craft…and the end result of repeating their mistakes.

Some hard-times don’t happen behind plows, they happen behind dish-pits and cash registers. Some ramblers don’t feel the hot breath of freedom, just the smell of car exhaust and a couch for a bed. From the folk revival through the golden age of country music, deafened by punk shows and brass bands alike, Chris’s songwriting is a nod to the absurd yet muted brilliance that inhabits the molded corners of the bars he patrons and cratered street he treads, paired with a pained honesty that merits a long second look.

Presented by Road Less Travelled

This is an 16+ event