Events

[INDIE] Jeremy Quentin may come from Flint, Michigan, but he’s spent quite a bit of time in Buffalo. He’s also spent a lot of time not really having a home, living the nomadic existence of a troubadour—perpetually touring (200 shows last year), living out of his car, and couch surfing. But all that changed recently when he decided to sprout roots in Austin, Texas. “It’s the first time I’ve done this in my adult life,” he said over the phone from Burlington, where his musical project, Small Houses—which comes to Mohawk Place on Thursday, May 12—was performing at a festival. “I wasn’t even really thinking about the music scene when I made the decision. Austin, to me, is like a dream—I can ride my bike, have my coffee shop and grocery store right nearby, I have a piano right in my house, it’s summer all the time. It’s so calm there. I never wake up thinking that the day is gonna suck.” Quentin says the new living arrangement has impacted his writing because of having the keyboard at his disposal, allowing him to compose songs on the piano and then re-work them for guitar. On his current trek, he’s joined by his vocalist friend Sophie who flew in from Amsterdam to sing with him, putting a softer feminine touch on his trademark gravelly tone during her first trip to the States. He’s been working on a follow up to 2015’s Still Talk; Second City and ran a pledge campaign to raise funds, which he’s now supplementing with hours at that coffee shop near his home. While Quentin readily admits that having a label to help fund the process of recording and releasing music would be a welcome change, he’s committed to making it happen by whatever means necessary. “If it bugged me, I wouldn’t do it. But there’s something exciting about it—you love packaging it and receiving your test pressing. Every time you do it, you want it to be better than the last, so it feels like a new experience each time. “I’m working seven days a week right now to buy studio time for the fall,” he continued, noting that while funding is necessary for obvious reasons, it needn’t run the show. “If you’re on the road all the time and you’re broke, when all your friends are broke and you’re living that existence with one another, money leaves the conversation pretty quickly. I hear these complaints about insane licensing issues and problems with Spotify—if we get fed and have a place to sleep, I don’t understand what the argument is about.” Doors are at 7pm with an early poetry reading from City Honors freshman Cayli Enderton and sets from Tough Old Bird and the Sonny Baker/Alex Berkley duo.