Concert | Rock Legend John Cale, Founder of The Velvet Underground Performs in a Park

Never shying away from risk taking, John Cale wants us to reimagine what music can be. A founder of the band The Velvet Underground, which fundamentally changed rock music, Cale continues to strip away formulas and invent new ways of creating and listening. Tomberlin, the opener, complements her emotionally hefty lyrics with sparse and delicate instrumentation, using her music as a sonic altar to both examine and hold our collective feelings.

Please Note: A limited amount of chairs will be available at this show, but you are also permitted to bring your own. For deaf and hard of hearing communities, there will be an ASL interpreter at the left side of the stage.

About the Artists
For nearly 60 years, or at least since he was a young Welshman who moved to New York and formed The Velvet Underground, John Cale has been reinventing his music with regularity. In those early days of changing rock 'n' roll, he was also making ecstatic viola drones and playing with La Monte Young's epochal ensemble. There was the chamber folk of Paris 1919, followed instantly by the gnarled rock of Fear. The provocative and spare song cycle Music for a New Society followed more than 30 years later. Once again, here is Cale, reimagining how his music is made, sounds, and even works. His 12-track MERCY (2023) - his first full album of new tunes in a decade - moves through true dark-night of-the-soul electronic torment toward vulnerable love songs and hopeful considerations for the future with the help of some of music's most curious young minds. Laurel Halo, Sylvan Esso, Animal Collective: They're but half of the astounding cast here, brilliant musicians who climb inside Cale's consummate vision of the world and help him redecorate there.

Tomberlin is Sarah Beth Tomberlin, a pastor's kid born in Florida, raised in rural Illinois. She wrote the majority of her debut, At Weddings (2018), while living at home. Less than a year after her first live show, she performed on Jimmy Kimmel and ended up moving to L.A., which is where she wrote Projections (2020)s. Her new album was recorded in Brooklyn over the course of two weeks, with producer and engineer Phil Weinrobe (who played a variety of instruments on the collection), and later mastered by Josh Bonati.

Doors open at 6:30 pm.