Luna Star Events | Luna Star Cafe

WE ARE A LISTENING ROOM, SO WE ASK THAT YOU RESPECT THE MUSICIANS AND THE PEOPLE HERE WHO CAME TO LISTEN TO THEM. PLEASE KEEP YOUR VOICES TO A LOW WHISPER WHILE THE MUSICIANS ARE PERFORMING, OTHERWISE YOU WILL BE SHUSHED. REALLY! =) There is a $13 minimum on food or drink purchases when there is a live performance or a open mic. this does not include the cover charge. IF YOU DO NOT INTEND TO EAT OR DRINK THEN THERE WILL BE A $13 CAMPING FEE…REALLY! This does not include the cover charge when applicable. Cover charges vary. All monies collected from the cover charge go directly to the musicians.

WE DO NOT EXCEPT CREDIT CARDS

november

sat17nov(nov 17)9:00 pmDiane Ward & the Band of Virgos Birthday BashVIDEO SHOOT for her first single from her soon to be released album "SIX"9:00 pm

tue20nov(nov 20)6:00 pmOPEN JAM6:00 pm

wed21nov(nov 21)8:30 pmMO MORGEN AND FRIENDS8:30 pm

thu22novAll DayWE ARE CLOSED FOR THANKSGIVING. HAVE A GREAT TURKEY DAY(All Day)

fri23nov(nov 23)8:00 pmWAGNER, HAND, & PFLUG8:00 pm

sat24nov(nov 24)8:00 pmOPEN MIC HOSTED BY WAGNER, HAND & PFLUG8:00 pm

tue27nov(nov 27)6:00 pmOPEN JAM6:00 pm

wed28nov(nov 28)11:00 pmWE WILL BE CLOSED FOR HOLIDAY NOV. 28TH THRU JAN. 3RD11:00 pm

december

wed28nov(nov 28)11:00 pmWE WILL BE CLOSED FOR HOLIDAY NOV. 28TH THRU JAN. 3RD(november 28) 11:00 pm

january

wed28nov(nov 28)11:00 pmWE WILL BE CLOSED FOR HOLIDAY NOV. 28TH THRU JAN. 3RD(november 28) 11:00 pm

sat05jan(jan 5)8:00 pmFOLK CLUB OF SOUTH FLORIDA PRESENTS ANDREW McKNIGHT8:00 pm

Event Details

“Stretching across the landscape of American folk music is a highway paved by Guthrie and Dylan… now Virginia native Andrew McKnight takes his turn smoothing down the blacktop” – Performing Songwriter

Since permanently leaving his corporate environmental engineering career in 1996, award-winning folk and Americana artist Andrew McKnight’s musical journey has traced nearly a million miles of blue highways, and earned him a wealth of critical acclaim and enthusiastic fans for his captivating performances and seven recordings.

The singer, writer, guitarist and storyteller usually tours solo, but also performs frequently with founding Nitty Gritty Dirt Band member Les Thompson fronting their genre-bending quartet Beyond Borders. His music is heard on broadcast and internet radio around the world, and he’s been a featured guest on the NPR/PRI syndicated Art of the Song and River City Folk shows. He is an insightful essayist and poet, a gifted workshop leader, and a warm and thoughtful interview.

Taking his cue from the lyrics of his award-winning song “Good Things Matter“, Andrew often shares his talents both on the road and close to home near northwestern Virginia’s Blue Ridge to help “neighbors in need”. Whether aiding people living on the margins with food drives at concerts, singing for and about workers and communities displaced by mountaintop removal coal mining, or introducing children to music and creativity, he has seen the power of music to help others up close.

His empathy and curiosity span a wide range of subjects, from the vulnerability of an illegal immigrant woman (“These Shoes“) to imagining what words Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings might have written about their lives together (“Diary“). In addition to his passion for community causes, he is a longtime advocate for preserving American landscapes and heritage. Several of McKnight’s songs are rooted in Appalachian history and culture, including the haunting Civil War ballad “The Road to Appomattox“.

Those passions, and the thoughtful ways he expresses them, have drawn legions of fans who sustain his independent career. In the early 1990s Andrew grasped the power of the internet to grow and connect with a loyal listenership, and his career has blossomed largely through their “efangelism” instead of the traditional elements of the music business. Many friends and fans even host concerts in their homes for 30 to 50 listeners, venues he refers to as “safe houses on the folk underground railroad”.

While no stranger to elite stages like the Kennedy Center, the Rocky Mountain Folks Festival or the Katharine Hepburn Theater, McKnight’s music seems to spread most rapidly through many of the diverse causes that have embraced his music over the years. He’s been profiled in a Wine Compass video episode with his friends at Catoctin Creek Distilling Company, his song “Made by Hand” is in Low Coal, a documentary about conflicts over mountaintop mining in West Virginia’s Coal River Valley, and “Good Things Matter” was featured in a podcast of Bread for the World, a global faith-based organization working to end hunger.

Andrew has produced or performed on recordings by many different artists, been a contributing writer for Blue Ridge Country and Americana Rhythm magazines, and is a sought-after clinician for songwriting and music business workshops. He enjoys an artist endorsement with Fairbuilt Guitars and since 2002 with Elixir Strings.

Time

5 (Saturday) 8:00 pm

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tue08jan(jan 8)6:00 pmOPEN JAM6:00 pm

wed09jan(jan 9)7:00 pmNASHVILLE SONGWRITERS ASSOCIATION INTERNATIONAL SOUTH FLORIDA CHAPTER OF SOUTH FLORIDA7:00 pm

sat12jan(jan 12)8:00 pmOPEN MIC HOSTED BY WAGNER, HAND & PFLUG8:00 pm

sun13jan(jan 13)6:00 pmHUGO6:00 pm

tue15jan(jan 15)6:00 pmOPEN JAM6:00 pm

wed16jan(jan 16)8:30 pmMO MORGEN & FRIENDS8:30 pm

thu17jan(jan 17)8:00 pmTHE HOWLIN' BROTHERS8:00 pm

fri18jan(jan 18)8:00 pmEVAN FRANKEL SOLO8:00 pm

tue22jan(jan 22)6:00 pmOPEN JAM6:00 pm

wed23jan(jan 23)8:00 pmTHE ROUGH & TUMBLE8:00 pm

thu24jan(jan 24)8:00 pmTHE APPALUCIANS8:00 pm

Event Details

THE APPALUCIANS

The Appalucians play music from the mountains of Western North Carolina, featuring spirited songwriting, sublime harmonies, and a layered interplay between dobro, guitars, harmonica and banjo. The band is the musical union of two couples Jay Brown and Aditi Sethi and Angie Heimann and Cas Sochacki who met at their kids’ preschool, gradually realized their seemingly cosmic musical alignment, and decided they better start a band.Their debut album “Bright Hills,” recorded at Higher Ground Studio in Birmingham, AL, released in early summer 2018, has flavors of mountain folk, 70’s folk-rock and barroom twang.

The moniker “the Appalucians” belies the band’s playful relationship with words, pairing their often mountain-esque sound with the root word “lucia” (latin for “light.”)The Appalucians’ repetoire, comprised mainly of songs penned by Ohio-born Angie Heimann (guitar, vocals, banjo,) and Alabama native Jay Brown (guitar, vocals, harmonica) explores themes both dark and light, connecting to the peaks and valleys of the human experience. Brown’s other projects include rhythm/roots band Lazybirds, his solo work as a one-man-band, and Aditi and Jay, duet project with his wife Aditi Sethi. Heimann’s other projects include performing solo and fronting the California-born band the Blushin’ Roulettes, which has morphed into a duet project with her partner Cas Sochacki.

The life experiences of the band members have contributed largely to both the depth and the playfulness of their music’s running themes. India-born, Georgia raised Aditi Sethi (bass, vocals) works as an end-of-life care physician and doula. Jay Brown works as a music therapist in hospice. As songwriters, Jay Brown and Angie Heimann are often both drawn to themes of the passing of time in life and the great beyond. All members of the Appalucians have endured the deaths of dear friends and bandmates in their musical pasts, which informs the depth of their performance in songs like “Rhythm in the Wind,” “Hailbop” and “Summerlawn.”

The band’s sillier side is expressed in off-the-cuff witty stage banter, and funny songs like “Don’t Bother Me,” a song for parents of young children, penned by Cas Sochacki- (dobro, occasional baritone vocals.) Sochacki also engineers Farmstead Studio, the birthplace of the side project “Old Mill Radio Hour” a comedy/music show which includes writing and music of members of the Appalucians/Lazybirds/Blushin’ Roulettes, and is scheduled to hit the folk festival circuit summer 2019.

The Appalucians toured California and Alaska in the summer of 2018 to celebrate the release of their debut album Bright Hills.

Time

24 (Thursday) 8:00 pm

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fri25jan(jan 25)8:00 pmWAGNER, HAND & PFLUG8:00 pm

sat26jan(jan 26)8:00 pmOPEN MIC8:00 pm

sun27jan(jan 27)8:00 pmmon28(jan 28)11:00 pmJOHN FULLBRIGHT8:00 pm - 11:00 pm (28)

Event Details

JOHN FULLBRIGHT

“What’s so bad about happy?” John Fullbright sings on the opening track of his new album, ‘Songs.’ It’s a play on the writer’s curse, the notion that new material can only come through heartbreak or depression, that great art is only born from suffering.

“A normal person, if they find themselves in a position of turmoil or grief, they’ll say, ‘I need to get out of this as fast as I can,’” says Fullbright. “A writer will say, ‘How long can I stay in this until I get something good?’ And that’s a bullshit way to look at life,” he laughs.

That plainspoken approach is part of what’s fueled the young Oklahoman’s remarkable rise. It was just two years ago that Fullbright released his debut studio album, ‘From The Ground ’ to a swarm of critical acclaim. The LA Times called the record “preternaturally self-assured,” while NPR hailed him as one of the 10 Artists You Should Have Known in 2012, saying “it’s not every day a new artist…earns comparisons to great songwriters like Townes Van Zandt and Randy Newman, but Fullbright’s music makes sense in such lofty company.” The Wall Street Journal crowned him as giving one of the year’s 10 best live performances, and the album also earned him the ASCAP Foundation’s Harold Adamson Lyric Award. If there was any doubt that his debut announced the arrival of a songwriting force to be reckoned with, it was put to rest when ‘From The Ground Up’ was nominated for Best Americana Album at the GRAMMY Awards, which placed Fullbright alongside some of the genre’s most iconic figures, including Bonnie Raitt.

“I never came into this with a whole lot of expectations,” says Fullbright. “I just wanted to write really good songs, and with that outlook, everything else is a perk. The fact that we went to LA and played “Gawd Above” in front of a star-studded audience [at the GRAMMY pre-tel concert], never in my life would I have imagined that.”

But for Fullbright, it hasn’t been all the acclaim that means the most to him, but rather his entrance into a community of songwriters whose work he admires.

“When I started out, I was all by myself in a little town in Oklahoma where whatever you wanted, you just made it yourself,” he explains. “I didn’t grow up around musicians or like-minded songwriters, but I grew up around records. One of the most fulfilling things about the last two years is that now I’m surrounded by like-minded people in a community of peers. You don’t feel so alone anymore.”

If there’s a recurring motif that jumps out upon first listen to ‘Songs,’ it’s the act of writing, which is one Fullbright treats with the utmost respect. “When I discovered Townes Van Zandt, that’s when I went, ‘You know, this is something to be taken pretty damn seriously,’” says Fullbright. “‘This is nothing to do with business, it has to do with art and identity.’ You can write something that’s going to outlast you, and immortality though song is a big draw.”

But just as important to Fullbright as writing is careful editing. “I can write a first verse and a chorus fairly easily, and it’s important just to document it at the time and come back to it later,” he explains. “That’s the labor, when you really get your tools out and figure out how to craft something that’s worthwhile.”

Fullbright inhabits his songs’ narrators completely, his old-soul voice fleshing out complex characters and subtle narratives with a gifted sense of understatement.

“My songwriting is a lot more economical now,” he explains. “I like to say as much as I can in 2 minutes 50 seconds, and that’s kind of a point of pride for me.”

The arrangements on ‘Songs’ are stripped down to their cores and free of ornamentation. Fullbright’s guitar and piano anchor the record, while a minimalist rhythm section weaves in and out throughout the album. That’s not to say these are simple songs; Fullbright possesses a keen ear for memorable melody and a unique approach to harmony, moving through chord progressions far outside the expected confines of traditional folk or Americana. The performances are stark and direct, though, a deliberate approach meant to deliver the songs in their purest and most honest form.

“I’m a better performer and writer and musician now, and I wanted a record that would reflect that,” he says. “We tracked a lot of it live, just me and a bass player in a room with a few microphones. The basis is a live performance and everything else supports that. I think you just get as much energy and skill as you can into a take, and then start building from there. And what we found is that you don’t have to add too much to that.”

The songs also reflect how drastically Fullbright’s life has changed since the release of ‘From The Ground Up,’ which launched him into a rigorous schedule of international touring. “Going Home” finds him appreciating the simple pleasure of heading back to Oklahoma, which he likens to The Odyssey. “When you’re gone for so long, once you know you’re headed in the right direction to your own bed and your own home, that’s one of the greatest feelings you can have,” he says.

“I Didn’t Know” is a song he premiered live at concert hosted by Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell, a story he tells still somewhat incredulously, while “When You’re Here” is a somber piano love song, and “The One That Lives Too Far’ is a raw account of the strain that distance can put on a romantic relationship. “All That You Know,” which features just voice and Wurlitzer, implores listeners to appreciate what’s right in front of them, and the finger-picked “Keeping Hope Alive” is a song of resilience through hard times.

To be sure, ‘Songs’ has its moments of darkness, tracks born from pain and heartbreak, but for a craftsman like Fullbright, there are few greater joys than carving emotion into music, taking a stab at that lofty goal of immortality through song. It makes him—and his fans—happy, and there’s nothing bad about that.

Time

27 (Sunday) 8:00 pm - 28 (Monday) 11:00 pm

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tue29jan(jan 29)6:00 pmOPEN JAM6:00 pm

wed30jan(jan 30)8:00 pmARTHUR CRUZ8:00 pm

thu31janSARAH JACOB TRIO AND DARREL ARNOLD8:00 pm

february

thu31janSARAH JACOB TRIO AND DARREL ARNOLD(january 31) 8:00 pm

tue05feb(feb 5)6:00 pmOPEN JAM6:00 pm

wed06feb(feb 6)8:00 pmLOYE AND TED8:00 pm

thu07feb(feb 7)8:00 pmHEATHER PIERSON ACOUSTIC TRIO8:00 pm

Event Details

“If you’re one of those people who likes any style done well– old-school jazz, folk, pop,
classical–you’ll love this prodigiously talented threesome. Keyboards, brass, all sorts of strings,
and beautiful singing make for a dynamic show packed with energy and surprises.”
Sarah Craig | Caffe Lena | Saratoga Springs, NY
The Heather Pierson Acoustic Trio are a rare bunch – three musicians from three very
different backgrounds, bringing their skills, their quiet charm, and their down-to-earth
honesty to bear on songs that bring to life the sounds of the streets of New Orleans and the
valleys of Appalachia. Their recordings (2015’s Still She Will Fly and 2017’s Singin’) and
live performances feature Heather’s multi-genre songwriting, their instrumental virtuosity,
and stirring three-part vocal harmonies.
Heather Pierson (lead vocals, acoustic guitar, tenor banjo, piano) is an award-winning
singer/songwriter, pianist, and performer. With eight previous solo recordings under her
belt, Heather’s wise-beyond-her-years songwriting, angelic voice, and world-class chops
have catapulted her into the spotlight.
Davy Sturtevant (cornet, dobro, fiddle, mandolin, harmony vocals) is a veteran touring
artist, producer, engineer, songwriter, and performer. Armed with a gorgeous tenor voice
and a mighty arsenal of instruments that come to life in his capable hands, Davy is at once a
witty, thoughtful, and engaging musical presence.
Shawn Nadeau (bass, harmony vocals) brings a rock solid thump and nearly two decades of
performing experience to the trio, informed by a wide spectrum of unique rhythmic and
melodic sensibilities ranging from rockabilly to reggae to jazz.

Time

7 (Thursday) 8:00 pm

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sat09feb(feb 9)8:00 pmOPEN MIC HOSTED BY WAGNER, HAND & PFLUG8:00 pm

tue12feb(feb 12)6:00 pmOPEN JAM6:00 pm

wed13feb(feb 13)7:00 pmNASHVILLE SONGWRITERS ASSOCIATION INTERNATIONAL SOUTH FLORIDA CHAPTER OF SOUTH FLORIDA7:00 pm

fri15feb(feb 15)8:00 pmGRANT PEEPLES8:00 pm

tue19feb(feb 19)6:00 pmOPEN JAM6:00 pm

wed20feb(feb 20)8:30 pmMO MORGEN & FRIENDS8:30 pm

fri22feb(feb 22)8:00 pmWAGNER, HAND & PFLUG8:00 pm

sat23feb(feb 23)8:00 pmOPEN MIC8:00 pm

sun24feb(feb 24)7:00 pmBILLY KEMP7:00 pm

Event Details

BILLY KEMP

My name is Billy Kemp, and I’m a musician. I’ve been playing guitar for forty-five years and also play the banjo, bass, harmonica, piano and anything you can get a sound out of. I live in Nashville, Tennessee where I have hung my hat infrequently, since I spend so much of my time on the road. I average five or six tours annually, which take me all over the United States, Canada and the British Isles. I like hearing the ways people talk, especially their different accents. And then there are all of the stories.

Playing music is on the schedule everyday unless I’m driving on the highways, riding on the rails, or flying in the air and even then, I’m making things on my tablet. I also religiously follow an instruction that was given to me by the great jazz and flamenco guitarist Charlie Byrd. He told me: “Practice your scales everyday. I still do.”

Making things out of music is what I like to do – I’m fascinated by the life-cycle of songs; which are first written, then recorded, and finally shared with an audience, at which point a whole new journey begins…

After many wonderful years of writing, recording and performing with the Appalachian Folk duo, Jeni & Billy, I am excited and curious to see where the next bend in the musical highway will lead.

Over the past forty years I’ve recorded five solo albums and written over two hundred songs. I’ve performed on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry and played loud electric guitar on international rock tours. I have worn the hat of producer, facilitator, teacher and composer. I established and ran a successful studio in the mid-Atlantic area for fifteen years, facilitated a music program at the Baltimore City Detention Center, taught at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and composed music for Maryland Public Television.

Some things I like to do other than music are: yoga, walking, cooking, reading and playing in the dirt or at least outside. My sister recently told a friend that “my brother always wanted to be a farmer” and there may be some truth in that. I can say, like the farmer, I am always hopeful.