This intimate concert in a brand new venue, featuring a New Orleans singer-songwriter of the highest caliber, was a thing of beauty: truly a show for music lovers by music lovers.

When I got the invitation to attend a show in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, it seemed like a bit of a stretch but not an outlandish idea. It’s 90 minutes from Minneapolis; I’ve gone that far to see a show in Rochester, Minnesota. Still, it has to be something special to get me out of the Twin Cities. I’ve chased a few favorite acts to Wisconsin and attended some unique festivals there (Blue Ox and Great River Folk Fest) but not too often.

This show was going to be something special, Jordan Duroe assured me. Jordan, who’s had an Americana/alt country radio show called Farewell Transmission on Converge Radio (101.9FM) since late 2021, has started organizing live shows in the past few months. He messaged me on Instagram to invite me down to see Chris Acker, a New Orleans-based artist who hadn’t toured in our region before. “He’s one of the best young lyricists out there right now—cut from that John Prine cloth, and as a huge Prine fan I don’t say that lightly,” Jordan wrote.

I watched a couple performance videos and was intrigued. The addition to the lineup of Hemma, a Minneapolis artist I adore, and Wisconsin pedal steel virtuoso Ben Lester sweetened the deal even more, enough to make the trek on a Monday night. But I didn’t take a deep dive into Acker’s music; I wanted the live experience to be fresh and unpredictable.

Jordan greeted me and my friend Cory at the door of the venue, UME Studio. Just across the tiny tributary Eau Claire River and less than half a mile away from the much larger venue Pablo Center at the Confluence in the culture-rich Barstow Street District, the newly opened yoga/meditation studio also houses a 40-seat venue. It’s a strangely harmonious combination; concert posters, guitars and books about Bob Dylan coexist with salt lamps, singing bowls and books about meditation.

The stage at UME Studio, Eau Claire WI. Photo by Carol Roth.

UME is a passion project of music lover and meditation practitioner Kat Mason and her partner Brad Keith, a lifelong fan of music, especially by storytellers like Dylan and Prine. The pair moved to Eau Claire in 2017 and hosted a few outdoor shows at their new home. During COVID lockdown, Kat discovered sound as a form of meditation (she hosts weekly sound baths at UME). For the past two years they’ve worked to create a space that provides both types of experiences. UME opened its doors in January, and the Chris Acker show on March 20, 2023, was their first ticketed event.

Cory and I arrived well before the show, so we had time to explore the studio and meet Chris. He and Jordan explained how they’d met “on the internet” about a year ago for a Farewell Transmission interview. (He was the show’s “first and second guest,” Jordan likes to joke, because the original interview recording was lost and Chris agreed to do it again.) This was Chris’s first trip to our region; the closest he’d come before was Indiana. Jordan had helped arrange four shows across the state, and this was to be the first.

Despite (or maybe because of) having just come from doing several shows at South by Southwest, Chris was relaxed and chatty and hilarious as we sat and ate pizza before the show. He has a disarming way of drawing stories out of people; I found myself telling him about one of my life partners, and his questions revealed his keen storyteller’s sense of really listening and observing the people and places around him.

In spite of that knack for getting others to talk about themselves, I did get to learn more about Chris as well. A New Orleans resident originally from Seattle, he’s immersed himself in what sounds like a rich music scene where trad jazz and Americana crosspollinate, with musicians often playing in both genres. His early music was recorded at Mashed Potato Records, an artist-run label that started in New Orleans and is now based in Canada.

It’s where Chris became friends with Nick Shoulders, another Mashed Potato alum who moved back to Arkansas at the beginning of the pandemic and started his own label, Gar Hole Records. Chris didn’t know that when he sent a newly recorded album to a few friends, including Nick, but he soon became one of Gar Hole’s first artists. (The label has since quickly distinguished itself with an impressive roster that also includes Dylan Earl and the Lostines.)

Hearing these stories of creative confluence from Chris, Jordan, Kat and Brad; looking around the studio; and listening to Hemma and Ben Lester do sound check in the next room, I was struck by how serendipitous the experience felt. I was surrounded by people like me, guided by their love of music, drawn to moments of genuine human connection, naturally inclined to use those dual passions to bring more music to more people. It set the stage for the show to come.

Hemma

The night opened with Hemma (real name Hannah Hebl), a Twin Cities singer-songwriter originally from Eau Claire. Her music is hard to describe, though I guess it falls in a very broad range of “folk.” I’ve seen Hemma several times, typically with just her guitar, her voice and a drum machine. Her melodies cascade from her lips in almost hypnotic waves, her voice landing somewhere between ethereal and resonant, accompanied by delicate fingerpicking and minimal electronic beats. Sometimes I zone out and let her music wash over me, until a striking lyric grabs my ear, moves me or gets me thinking.

For this show her voice was joined by Liz Eldridge’s harmonies, and I was reminded that while I’ve mostly seen Hemma do solo shows, she’s also a natural at singing with others (a product of her upbringing, I learned during her set). I’ve seen her join acts like the Cactus Blossoms and Nikki Grossman of the Sapsuckers to create truly unforgettable live music moments. In addition to her own music—a full-length album should be coming this year!—Hannah also collaborates with folk duo Bad Posture Club and eclectic artist Kenan Serenbetz to create Catharus, a four-person choir exploring the American hymn tradition.

Hemma was also accompanied by Eldridge’s partner, Ben Lester, whose unconventional (and brilliant) pedal steel playing I saw when he joined the Cactus Blossoms for their January 2022 Turf Club residency. For Hemma’s set he also played a keyboard, generating ambient and avante garde effects that swirled around the two women’s intertwined vocals.

Chris Acker

After Hemma’s stirring yet somehow relaxing set, Chris Acker took the stage. Ben Lester joined in for his first few songs, and even though they’d just met in person that day (“You’re watching a Craigslist date in real time,” Chris joked), they played like they’d collaborated for much longer. Chris noted that Ben has the ability to do the “hot stuff” Nashville pedal steel players are known for but can also be inventive, playing outside the box the instrument often gets placed in. Both sides of his pedal steel artistry were on display during the handful of songs he accompanied Chris on, sometimes coming in more traditional and other times taking off in unexpected directions.

Just as he had during our preshow hangout, Chris had the room laughing within seconds of sitting down. But he’s got a knack, which Jordan cautioned me about, for turning his audience’s laughter to tears without warning, so the opening lines of his first song, “Someday Lovers,” quickly put me in a more pensive mood: “Clouds pressed upon the glass like foam on a coming tide / I’m not the same size in your thoughts as you are in mine.”

Chris’s voice is as difficult to describe as Hemma’s. There’s something unadorned and homely about it, yet it contributes nearly as much as his lyrics to the emotional journey he charts for his listeners, almost physically tugging a groundswell of sadness out of your body, or making you giggle with delight at his obvious glee when he delivers an especially funny line. Often songs contain both, as in “Dallas,” a mildly humorous but mostly tragic tale about Bambi Woods, the exploited star of one of the most famous porn flicks of all time.

In a set that contained at least 10 songs but felt like it was five minutes long, Chris brought the crowd back and forth across this spectrum of emotions, over and over. His first solo song after Ben left the stage was one of the ones I’d listened to beforehand that instantly became one of my favorite songs, period. “Nick and Joe” is an unembellished but beautifully rendered story about a friend of his, whose first love affair (with a much older man) came full circle when his former flame was facing terminal illness. Nick took Joe in and provided care and comfort in his last days.

As we in the audience tried to catch our breath after the last lines—“Late some spring evening / Two lovers lay sleeping / Down the hall from each other they listen / To each other breathing”—Chris smiled with mischief in his eyes. “This next song’s really stupid,” he said, and proceeded to serenade us on the topic of caviar (“the gumballs, the black seed that taste of the unborn”).

His encore song contained the most stark juxtaposition of humor and pathos. “Aloe Vera” is a talking song that starts out as a wistful lost-love story that becomes a hilariously elaborate petty revenge fantasy about a former lover’s new man (“I hope his lips are just too chapped to kiss / And there's an ingrown hair and arthritis in his wrists / And his eyes are glued shut by mucus”).

Chris had the crowd in stitches with jokes about the song becoming a viral incel sensation, imagining the Qanon Shaman listening to it while wrecking up the Capitol. Then, still fingerpicking all the while, he explained that in the middle of writing this song, he got a phone call about a friend’s untimely death. The last verse of “Aloe Vera” has nothing to do with the lyrics he’d written thus far; it’s just a devastatingly gentle four-line eulogy:

My friend drove his motorcycle in the air

His body went down and his soul stayed up there

Now he's rearranging all the clouds like

Letters on a marquis till the sun comes out

With that, the night was over, but thanks to the generosity and genius of Farewell Transmission’s host, the effects of experiencing Chris Acker, Hemma and Ben Lester at UME Studio are going to stay with me for a long time.

Buy/Stream Chris Acker’s Music

Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the primary 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 T.A. Berkeley!

Show Review: Chris Acker & Hemma at UME Studio in Eau Claire, Wisconsin

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