American Music Concert Series: Slow Parade

About this event

Celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary with American music at the library! Join us for the second event in this two-part concert series to learn about the history of rock-and-roll, featuring a live performance from Slow Parade. Don’t miss out on this historical music experience!

About the Artist:

Slow Parade is the musical messenger of songwriter Matthew Pendrick. Based in the fertile musical landscape of Atlanta, Georgia, Slow Parade distills a familiar recipe of Roots, Blues and Country into a potent elixir once known as Rock & Roll.

Born and raised in Decatur, Georgia, a sleepy southern town lulling in the shadows east of Atlanta, Slow Parade leader Matthew Pendrick came up during a creative heyday in one of the South’s small town artistic meccas. As a kid, Pendrick honed his musical chops while busking under the tutelage of notorious street musician ‘Guitar Red’. Soaking up the city’s deep musical history while digging down through the roots, Pendrick has shared the stage with many of the South’s musical torch bearers as well as contemporaries as diverse as Daniel Romano, CW Stoneking , Anderson East, Israel Nash and Buffalo Nichols. After a decade and half spent touring, writing, and recording , often as a sideman for some of the city’s most promising young talent , Slow Parade is eager to step out on his own and kick transmission in high gear.

Slow Parade's 3rd LP Maybe You'll Come Around Again follows closely on the heels of 2020's psychedelia soaked Hi-Fi LowLife , but strips back the shiny veneer of digital technology in search of something less. With echoes of Harvest -era Neil Young or the Band's more clear eyed moments at Big Pink, Maybe You'll Come Around Again finds Slow Parade digging new holes in old dirt, following in the footsteps of their folksy forefathers down the path that lies in service of the song. These songs exist in the here and the now: a reality as hazy as a Sunday morning hangover. Pendrick’s characters are low on gas, incurious of redemption, and probably high on something.

"I've been taking my time with a dream I can't mend," Pendrick muses wistfully on ‘Napping on the Job,’ trading twang for a touch of blissful atmospherics. As the melody swirls and shimmers around the ears in a hallucinatory trance of lush pedal steel, Slow Parade beckons us to surrender to the dream. If only for a few stolen winks, if only for one last drink, if only for a few more miles. Maybe it doesn't have to be so complicated. Maybe You'll Come Around Again .