SHAKEY GRAVES PLAYS AS TULIPS TURNS SIX
The Austin songwriter returns to North Texas with Fondness, Etc., playing Tulips’ sixth anniversary on November 20.
– JAMBALOO EDITORIAL TEAM
For much of his career, Shakey Graves has seemed determined to make sure nobody gets too comfortable with what they think Shakey Graves is supposed to sound like. Alejandro Rose-Garcia first emerged as the ragged one-man-band behind Roll the Bones, stomping out percussion while playing guitar with the kind of physical intensity that made the whole thing feel as though it might collapse at any moment, but the 15 years since have steadily expanded that idea rather than simply polishing it.
On Friday, November 20, Graves brings that increasingly difficult-to-categorize catalog to Fort Worth for Tulips’ sixth anniversary, a particularly fitting booking for a venue that has spent those six years pulling artists into rooms considerably smaller than the stages they might otherwise occupy. Doors open at 7 p.m. with the show beginning at 8.
The timing also catches Graves at the beginning of another shift. His latest album, Fondness, Etc., arrived in May and pulls him back toward the homemade intimacy that first made his music feel so unusual, although the person making it now is living a very different life. Recorded largely by Rose-Garcia himself on TASCAM tape machines in Austin, often in the limited hours between dropping his daughter off and picking her up from daycare, it is a record preoccupied with time, parenthood and the uncomfortable realization that you can recognize a moment as important even while it is disappearing.
Rose-Garcia has described what he was chasing as a kind of “real-time nostalgia”: not looking back at some vanished golden period, but becoming aware that you are already living inside the memories you will eventually miss.
That distinction runs through songs including “When the Love Is New,” “Time Flies,” “On My Own” and “No Place to Be,” where soft vocals, old guitars, tape hiss and accidental noises are allowed to remain rather than being cleaned out of existence.
It is a noticeably different proposition from the wider, stranger world of 2023’s Movie of the Week, but returning to something smaller does not mean returning to the beginning. Graves has already made that journey impossible. And the War Came pushed his songs into full-band territory and produced “Dearly Departed,” while Can’t Wake Up wandered further into indie rock and psychedelia; what has remained consistent is the sense that each record is less interested in preserving a successful formula than finding out what happens when he pulls it apart.
That history is also what makes Graves particularly good in a room like Tulips. His live show can move from the intimacy of one man, one guitar and a song that barely seems to need amplification into something far more muscular without losing the feeling that the performance could change direction at any point. The early Shakey Graves mythology was built around doing an extraordinary amount with very little, and Fondness, Etc. finds him circling back toward that instinct with considerably more life behind it.
There is something nicely symmetrical about placing that version of Shakey Graves at the center of Tulips’ sixth birthday. The venue opened in 2020 and has spent the years since becoming one of Fort Worth’s most dependable places for seeing touring artists at close range; six years in, its anniversary show does not need a giant spectacle so much as an artist who understands exactly what can happen when a room still feels small enough to matter.
