WesternAF: Chris Acker, Northcote + Rachel Baiman

Road Less Travelled presents
WesternAF presents Chris Acker + Northcote + Rachel Baiman
Wednesday 20th May, 7:30pm
Tickets are £16 (+b/f) in advance and available from SeeTickets

WesternAF is taking three greats from the States across Europe this May to spread the word on good country music and joins us in York on the 20th!  A live intimate show with some of America's best kept secrets in country music.

Chris Acker

In a genre full of tall tales and marketable lies, Chris Acker crafts candid songs - weaving his wit and woes into a body of work that exposes the stale plight of the American Songster to the honest, and sometimes hilarious, light of day.

Since leaving his childhood home of Seattle, Washington, Chris Acker has called the haggard decadence of the New Orleans Americana world his purlieu. In the tradition of Guthrie and Prine, Chris lends a quavering voice to the half-rotten romance of the unremarkable and unrefined. Regardless if you're sitting by a backyard fire on a muggy Louisiana night or standing stage-side in some far flung town, when you hear Chris Acker playing, you're hearing the end result of countless hours of observing the masters of the craft...and the end result of repeating their mistakes.

Some hard-times don't happen behind plows, they happen behind dish-pits and cash registers. Some ramblers don't feel the hot breath of freedom, just the smell of car exhaust and a couch for a bed. From the folk revival through the golden age of country music, deafened by punk shows and brass bands alike, Chris's songwriting is a nod to the absurd yet muted brilliance that inhabits the molded corners of the bars he patrons and cratered street he treads, paired with a pained honesty that merits a long second look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMHBgaCns0g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K4Ij8UFwGs

Northcote

Northcote is the musical project of Canadian singer-songwriter Matt Goud, known for his heartfelt songwriting and dynamic live performances. Since launching in 2008, Northcote has toured internationally, performing alongside artists such as The Gaslight Anthem, Frank Turner, Hot Water Music and many more while building a loyal fanbase across North America and Europe.

In 2026, Northcote  is set to release To Cherish, a full-length album recorded at Rain City Studios in Vancouver and produced by Jesse Gander (Japandroids, White Lung). The project showcases an evolved sound with contributions from a talented ensemble of musicians including Paul Rigby (Neko Case) and long-time collaborator Stephen McGillvray.

Northcote has released seven studio albums and multiple singles, steadily growing an audience through powerful, emotionally resonant performances in intimate venues and major festivals alike. With over 42,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and a strong social media presence, Northcote continues to expand his reach, aiming for a sustainable international career while contributing meaningfully to the music community.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwusE_fAAWg

Rachel Baiman

Common Nation of Sorrow, Baiman's 2023 LP,  was called one of "The Best Albums of the Year (So Far)" by The Boston Globe, awarded 4 stars from American Songwriter, and deemed a "Tremendously and remarkable record" by The Amp.  On the heels of an album release year that saw her play move than 130 shows across the globe, Baiman has made 2024 her "Year of collaboration" with a series of A Side/B Side projects featuring some of her favorite songwriters including Pony Bradshaw, Caroline Spence, Nicholas Jamerson, and Kaia Kater. If Common Nation of Sorrow was a novel, this year's releases feel more like short stories, just long enough to make you want more.

Raised in Chicago, Baiman made her way to Nashville at 18 with the dream of being a professional fiddle player and has since released two solo records and an EP, alongside session and side-person work with Kacey Musgraves, Kevin Morby, and Molly Tuttle among many others. As a songwriter, she has garnered a reputation for her specific brand of political and personal lyricism, which Vice's Noisey described as 'Flipping off Authority one note at a time". 
In contrast with her previous work, (Watchouse's Andrew Marlin produced her debut album, Shame), Baiman was the sole producer of Common Nation of Sorrow. After recording for twelve days in Nashville with Grammy-Award-winning engineer Sean Sullivan, Baiman traveled to Portland, OR, where she spent two weeks mixing the record with famed engineer and producer Tucker Martine (My Morning Jacket/The Decemberists/First Aid Kit).

For her new collaborative singles, she turned to friend and indie-pop writer and producer Clare Reynolds, known professionally as Lollies.  "One thing I learned from producing my own record is that I love producing, as long as it's not my own parts", she laughs.  "I thought it would be great to have another kind of collaboration included in these new songs, on the production side.

The first In Collaboration single release, "Dominoes", with Pony Bradshaw, was the result of months of musical collaboration. "I'd been playing and singing in Bradshaw's band some, and on his upcoming record, and we'd always talked about writing something together.  So this felt like a natural progression."  The song hit 100,000 streams on Spotify in it's first month, and Wide Open Country called it "a gut wrenching tale that catalogs the tension between two people acting on their worst impulses, leading to a domino effect of fallout."

"I've been looking for a new well of inspiration, outside of myself," Rachel Baiman told Wide Open Country in early 2024. "Every time that you work with someone you admire there's a lot of growth that happens from being around their creative process and how they approach a song. It brings a new energy to my own work when I can find a  new perspective I hadn't seen before".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejBALbmPhhc