Exclusive: The Sapsuckers to announce a monthly residency at Palmer’s Bar in Minneapolis
You heard it here first! The Minneapolis winter forecast just got brighter thanks to an exciting upcoming announcement from Wisconsin-based country duo The Sapsuckers!
Nikki Grossman and Joe Hart of The Sapsuckers. Photo credit: Brandie Myhre, 2021.
The prospect of winter in Minnesota just got a little less bleak, thanks to some good news: Wisconsin-based country duo The Sapsuckers—helmed by Joe Hart and Nikki Grossman—are planning their first-ever Minneapolis residency at Palmer’s Bar, the pair confirmed. The official announcement, with opening acts and other details revealed, will be coming soon.
It’s another shift in focus for a band that’s learned to roll with the pandemic punches in order to make music their full-time profession. At the end of 2019, the plan looked a lot different—Hart and Grossman were all set to quit their day jobs, move to Saint Louis, start working with a band there and enroll their daughter in kindergarten. “We had the material and financing figured out to record an album and an EP,” Hart says. “We had a really busy schedule with some pretty great gigs.”
Then the pandemic (of course)
Then—well, you know what happened in early 2020. “From March 15 to April 15, 2020, literally everything just melted away,” Grossman says. “Everything was canceled, and we had no idea what was happening.” They stayed in Wisconsin and began livestreaming every week, which was their only source of income for months.
Nikki Grossman and Joe Hart of The Sapsuckers. Photo credit: Brandie Myhre, 2021.
It was a confusing and demoralizing time—for everyone, though musicians were of course one of the hardest-hit groups. “A lot of our friends in the industry—including people we looked up to as being ‘out in front’ of us on their musical trajectory—were quitting, at least temporarily,” Hart says. “We knew really strong and successful musicians who got a job at a grocery store or just re-evaluated who they were and what they were doing because there was such uncertainty for live performances.”
Determined to make it through as musicians, The Sapsuckers continued to innovate, including hosting an outdoor COVID-safe concert series on their rural Wisconsin homestead during the summer months. “That was pretty successful, and it helped a lot,” Grossman says. “But we honestly thought about quitting outright. It’s not easy, doing the back-end work to support our writing and performance, and it felt like everything we had built was just blown away overnight.”
Ultimately, the pair decided that they needed to record their new material, even if they ended up quitting music after that. “We moved forward on recording with our Saint Louis band, and it made us realize we should just ... keep moving forward,” Hart says. They recorded an album’s worth of their songs during lockdown (with more than enough left over for an EP) and released two of them as a limited-edition vinyl 45, but it was hard to pull the trigger on releasing the full album with the pandemic still very much in flux. “We’re now looking at a February or March 2022 record release,” he says.
Plans for the Palmer’s residency (and beyond)
So why Minneapolis for a residency, when Wisconsin and Missouri are their current and once-prospective home states? “We had a handful of really terrific shows in Minneapolis—Icehouse, Palmer’s—both with a band (made up of locals) and without it, and it just seemed like the universe was pushing us to keep going forward with the Minneapolis version of the Sapsuckers band for now,” Hart says. “So here we are!”
Besides Grossman and Hart, the band for the residency will comprise Chris Hepola on drums, Eric Struve on bass, Dan Lowinger on electric guitar, and various guests. Opening acts are TBA; the pair will only say that the ones confirmed “are great!” (They also promise that each show will feature a Western wear contest with prizes!)
The Sapsuckers. Photo credit: Brandie Myhre, 2021.
Anticipating that many people will appreciate home-based entertainment over the long cold (and possibly coronavirus-riddled) winter, the duo are also “scheming on” a new iteration of last year’s popular livestream series. This one, they say, will be “part music, part comedic shenanigans.” (Last year’s had its fair share of comedy, with special drinking-game and “human jukebox” editions.)
Looking ahead, Hart says, “We’re putting the pieces together to book hard as a five- or six-piece band in 2022. Where it goes from there? I don’t know if it even matters anymore. We’ll just keep on keepin’ on until it becomes clear.”
Residency details
Here’s what else we know so far about the soon-to-be-officially-announced Palmer’s residency:
Fourth Sundays, November 2021–March 2022. (That’s Nov. 28, Dec. 26, Jan. 23, Feb. 27 and March 27.)
Doors at 7:30 p.m., music at 8.
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the main music journalist and social media publicist for Adventures in Americana. In addition to studying the guitar and songwriting, Carol’s additional creative side hustle is writing self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym @taberkeley!
