Friendship & Charlotte Cornfield, with more eaze

Friendship and Charlotte Cornfield play The First Unitarian Church on Tuesday, December 8, with more eaze opening the bill. It's a double bill of songwriters who both have new records they're working from.

Friendship's new album, Caveman Wakes Up, is their second for Merge Records and pushes their definition of country music out a bit further. Songwriter Dan Wriggins wrote the songs on a downtuned classical guitar he borrowed from MJ Lenderman after leaving the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the summer of 2023, and he tracked the whole thing in five days with engineer Jeff Ziegler. Wriggins' ragged baritone is the voice that carries it. The band around him includes drummer Michael Cormier O'Leary, who leads the instrumental collective Hour, and bassist Jon Samuels, who runs Dear Life Records—the same label that's home to peers like MJ Lenderman, Florry, and Fust.

Charlotte Cornfield's latest, Could Have Done Anything, came out of a different kind of stretch. She recorded it with producer Josh Kaufman at Dreamland Recording Studios in Hurley, NY, where the two played every instrument themselves. The songs draw on her time on a spring tour of the American west and the arrival of her first baby, due in April 2023.

Opening the night is more eaze, the project of Brooklyn-based sound artist and multi-instrumentalist Mari Maurice, whose work weaves together everyday sounds, acoustic orchestration, and electronics. Doors open at 7:30 PM, the show starts at 8 PM, and tickets are $30.96.