Valley Maker w/ Run Dan Run at Charleston Pour House – Deck Stage – Charleston, SC

Valley Maker

w/ Run Dan Run

Sunday, July 27th

Charleston Pour House

Deck Stage

6pm doors /7pm show

$15 advance /$ 17 day of show

Valley Maker

For Austin Crane—the ruminative songwriter, riveting guitarist, and singular voice performing and collaborating as Valley Maker— these last few years have represented a period of profound transition. Early in 2019, Crane and his wife, Megan, decided it was time to leave Seattle. South Carolina natives, they’d been in Seattle for nearly seven years while he pursued a doctorate in human geography at the University of Washington, and she worked as a midwife. As Summer 2019 ended, they prepared to head east to Columbia, SC, rejoining a deep community of friends and moving into a century-old home in need of big love. Still, major questions loomed: Would they, just then past 30, like it enough to stay, to start a new life? And what did it mean to go home? This flux is the anchor for Crane’s fourth and best album as Valley Maker, the gorgeous and felicitous When the Day Leaves.

Driven as it is by departure, When the Day Leaves marks the arrival of Valley Maker as a trustworthy narrator for these shaky times. Crane synthesizes these complex feelings into the magnetic first single, “No One Is Missing.” A song about reckoning with self-doubt while searching for community, “No One Is Missing” acknowledges the tension inherent in those ideas, especially during our polarized era. The swaying “Branch I Bend” is a workaday anthem and an ode to whatever goodness you find, to recognizing grace in a world that can seem starved for it.

All these thoughts are rendered with newfound lyrical richness, balancing intimate tidbits with universal ambiguity. Crane raises questions only to let them linger, shaping clouds of geographical and political specifics and asking you to draw out the meaning. During “Mockingbird,” he sings of moving to his Columbia home and planting a new tree, tiny details that induce an imaginative diorama for the listener—where does life go from here?

In the months before recording began, Austin convened with producer Trevor Spencer and longtime harmonizing partner Amy Godwin for sessions in Portland and Seattle, teasing out the album’s interwoven arrangements and meticulous vocal harmonies. Then, in November 2019, Crane decamped from Columbia to the Pacific Northwest for a three-week session in the woods outside of Woodinville, a small town northeast of Seattle at the foot of the Cascades. He stayed in the loft of Spencer’s Way Out Studio, the collaborators sealing themselves off in a horse barn-turned-recording space like kids at summer camp, just as winter’s mist closed in.

The time commitment is a crucial component of When the Day Leaves. For 46 minutes, you feel like you’re sitting with Crane in an intricate, unified sound-world of his design. He offloads his observations about our tangled thicket of hope and fear, aspiration and exasperation.

When the Day Leaves is an uninterrupted sequence of reflections about the generational limbo of being awed by and worried for this world. The anxiety of uncertainty can be vexing, a reality these songs acknowledge. Crane, as he sings at one point, is fully “aligned with my blues.” But these songs also affirm that life is an endless opportunity for renewal, for trying again. As with dusk, when the day leaves and “tries to start again” amid a riot of expiring colors, we eventually learn what comes next.

Run Dan Run

Run Dan Run, affectionately known as RDR, began simply as a recording project amongst two friends, Dan McCurry and Nick Jenkins, in the spring of 2006. After hearing the initial recordings, Ash Hopkins expressed interest in being a part of this project. By the fall of 2006 Run Dan Run made it official as an indie rock band from Charleston, SC, performing regularly throughout the Southeast region. In the summer of 2007, Run Dan Run released their full-length debut album Basic Mechanics, touring the eastern United States from Massachusetts to Mississippi in support of the album. Basic Mechanics first defined the honest, lyrically-driven, indie rock that RDR is known for. In the winter of 2009, RDR released 27 Coming St., an acoustic EP revealing a disarmingly intimate and perhaps even more honest side of Run Dan Run. The EP was recorded live in a living room, each song being performed only twice with the best take being kept. In the summer of 2010, Run Dan Run began working on what would be their sophomore release taking the next year off from touring to focus on recording. This album, titled Normal, picks up where Basic Mechanics left off, exploring darker subject matter over richer arrangements with the polished sound of a well-seasoned band. Normal both sounds and feels like an album, complete and comfortable in its skin.

* Show is for all ages. Attendees under 18 must be accompanied by a parent. Attendees under 21 will be subject to a $5 surcharge. The surcharge must be paid in cash at the door on the day of the event.