Slaid Back

Open your ears for a tasty midsummer double-up tonight at Swallow Hill Music Hall: Slaid Cleaves, an Americana keeper currently touring to promote Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away, will offer up a platter of songs from the new Gurf Morlix-produced album on the homegrown DIY label Music Road Records started by fellow songwriter Jimmy LaFave. It’s the kind of music, darkly written and cleanly sung, that seems to grow on trees in Austin, where Cleaves lives, but he rises to the top on the merit of talent and a perfect ear for authenticity.

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More About

• Slaid Cleaves
• Austin (Texas)
• The Dixie Chicks
• Jimmy LaFave
• Swallow Hill

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And then there are the headliners, Swedish/bluegrass girl group Abalone Dots, named after those fretboard dots on stringed instruments. The Scandinavian Dixie Chicks? That remains to be seen, but their sweet, high harmonies will hit the spot after Cleaves’s melancholy and sometimes wry vocals and exemplary Texas storytelling.

Cleaves and the Dots begin at 8 p.m. at Swallow Hill, 71 East Yale Avenue; for tickets, $15 to $21, go to www.swallowhillmusic.org or call 303-777-1003.
Sat., July 25, 8 p.m., 2009